Friday! Friday! Friday! Thank the Lord in heaven. This has been a challenging week, y’all. I’m glad we’re reaching the end of it.. Let’s dive in, shall we?
Well, you say that but …
Venezuela takes one step closer to becoming a dictatorship. Lefties across America wish they controlled the courts so they could do the same here…except with Trump. And the legislature. And some of the courts. And state legislatures. And governorships. And …well, you get the point. I just wonder if it’ll dawn on them that this is the march to death their political-economic dream leads to.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha. I mean, I’d love to see it happen, but the European Union boss threatening to break the U.S. up in retaliation for Trump applauding Brexit simply won’t happen. Also, I bet there was a military leader somewhere saying “The E.U.? How many divisions have they got?”
Two good friends.
Things are looking pretty bad for Devin Nunes. (TW: The Daily Beast pants-soiling.)
Actually, no they’re not, this is just leftists shitting themselves again. (VDH with another solid takedown of partisan hackery.)
Penn State trustee keeping it classy. I still say they should have razed the football stadium to the ground and turned it into a prison for child molestors. They’re not worthy of participating in organized sports after the shit they pulled.
❤️Thanks, Banjos❤️ It’s been five wonderful years since we got married. I bet the next five are even more fantastic.
Welp, after the discussion of biscuits from scratch and my getting distracted by Cheesecake Cupcakes I went and made some… okay, thirty seven of them. They’re addictive, and I’ve had to force myself to give them away before I completely lost it.
Oh, and I’m sorry about the remains of old cakes dribbled on that stove. I really should clean it (but other than propping up the cooling pans, and being attached to the oven, it was not involved in making these)
Come on, buddy. You can’t SugarFree a link about desserts.
http://fav.me/db42kc0
Hrmm… My answer which was just the URL vanished. Do comments like that go into a moderation queue?
Answer – yes, yes they do.
So that’s good to know: a comment that is just a web address will require moderation.
Looks like a straight up link gets dumped into spam. You gotta type something else as well or at least caption the link.
Now you know…And knowing is half the battle
I wasn’t aware that Venezuela had any steps left to take.
They can eat that poor, starving elephant.
of course that elephant is poor. It’s Venezuelan.
It’s the people’s elephant, after all.
When it comes to the misery of collectivism, there are always more steps that can be taken until everyone is dead…
There are always steps left to take.
Seen online: “Why do people keep saying Venezuela is a socialist country? Most people there do not work for the government.” *SIGH*
Did you see the plans for the EU army revealed after the Brexit vote?
Plans is all that army will ever be beyond some vague promises and some token units on loan.
I have been hearing that crap about an integrated Euroforce since the Wall fell.
“…hearing about…” That’s because you are not highly ranked enough to know about their actual existence. They’ve been around for 30+ years.
Longer than that
*applauds both of you*
The EU farmed out the work to the Japanese?
Team Euroforce…”The force for socialism” sounds like a spinoff movie from Southpark.
We’ll just send in the EM50 to take care of any E.U. army.
You get a *narrows gaze* however.
Rumor has it each General gets his or her own armchair!
Um, he can call for as many states to leave the union as he wants. Exactly what would he be accomplishing by doing so? I can call for France and Germany to leave the EU. That’ll have about as much impact.
the European Union boss threatening to break the U.S. up in retaliation for Trump applauding Brexit simply won’t happen
The Ohio part is what’s mystifying me. I suspect he had just finished drinking lunch.
Secession is about the only thing that would make Ohio interesting. Maybe then we can kick the Browns out of the NFL.
Hocking Hills is pretty nice.
That is true, if they did Secede then we might have to just keep Cincy just for Hocking Hills
I remember how pissed about outside meddling the EU bureaucrats were when Barack Obama openly campaigned for “Stay”.
Oh wait, it’s only meddling when Trump or his blood brother Putin do it.
Obama’s little intervention was probably worth 100k votes in favor of Brexit. I know Brexiteers who wish he’d stuck his nose in further and more often.
Being “sent to the back of the queue” couldn’t have been better calibrated for tabloid headlines, allowing commentators to tie in Rosa Parks.
Someone on Obama’s team should have told him =
“Brits don’t get a warm-fuzzy and squee when an American president makes token gestures of understanding their minor vocabulary-differences; they actually think its patronizing and demeaning.”
He was way too used to going to California, and having thousands of people explode with glee when he rolled his r’s saying something as banal as “Tortilla”.
Basically, he thought of himself as a political speech-making heavy-hitter after getting walked around the bases so many times.
I doubt if the Brits will ever forget level of hubris exhibited when the iPad of The collected thoughts of Chairman Obama was given to Queen Brenda at the state visit.
Mexico invents cloud which rains tequila in bid to attract holidaymakers to sun-drenched country
Now if they could just get their cartels to stop lopping heads off of tourists…
buena estela química
OW! MY EYES!
It’s been five wonderful years since we got married.
Other than the shit-smearing.
Thanks for raining on my parade! Besides, that’s apparently over. At least until we adopt another one.
Disclaimer: he’s talking about our children, who at various times loved to smear shit on themselves and any nearby surface they could find.
I was about to make a bad joke about them destined to be shitty cops. But then you used your goddamn magic powers again
Sorry. But I promise I’ve only used my powers for good.
But just think how strong their immune systems are. I bet they could split a tumbler of chicken blood and walk away unharmed.
Thanks for raining on my parade!
Insert golden showers joke here.
I’m glad we’re not the only parents to experience that. Our, now 6 year old, daughter was a veritable Picasso of finger-painting with poop when she was in her diaper stage. We had to resort to putting her to bed in onesies every night. I’m so happy those days are over.
My 3 are all adopted. Thank God I didn’t have to deal with any shit smearing. However, now that the oldest two are teenagers, we have other types of shit to deal with.
I find that cleaning a gun while questioning a suitor about his intentions inhibits the teenage libido. Or at least it did back when I was a teen.
That’s kind of sad.
What, you not getting the old joke?
*ducks*
Adopting kids ranks #1 in my book of Awesome Things. A kid not having someone who loves them or is stuck moving every so often from one foster home to another (I may be wrong about this – all I know is what I read in the papers) really makes me feel sad.
So kudos to you, Sloopy and all the other people who take a child into their home and heart!
Happy anniversary!
I’ve cleaned poop off walls. Never been happy about it but it comes with the turf.
Congratulations, Sloopy and Banjos, and wishing you many more happy years together.
Congrats! Happy Anniversary! Happy wife, happy life
Disabled, or just desperate?
What does disability payments have to do with urban vs rural chasm?
I believe because a large percentage of that rise in disability has occurred in so-called flyover country. It’s been attributed to the disaffected white, un(under?)employed voter who can’t compete in the high-tech service economy we’ve become. Essentially the same place the opioid epidemic is occurring– for same reasons.
Disability has to be the most abused of the social programs . I know a lot perfectly capable people drawing a check. There is a whole industry of doctors and Lawyers that exists solely to get people disability benefits.
I’ve always had a rather strict stance on disability. Basically I’d require that the claimaint show an utter inability to perform any useful task. So coma patients might be eligable, but not many others.
Coma patients MIGHT be eligible? I want you in charge of the eligibility division – you bastard! (Meant in a good way)
Well, coma patients can still vote Democrat, which counts as a job, right…?
I’ve done work with a charity that runs group homes for mentally disabled adults. Most of them hold down part-time jobs to help pay for their expenses. If a man with the mental capacity of a 10 year old can take a bus to work, show up on time, sweep the floors and clean the tables at Starbucks, so can most of these lazy souls.
Fuck the disability system.
And if not, we know of some perfectly respectable monocle-polishing emporia.
Federal disability is a racket. I had a job where every quarter my HR people would brief me on the people who were on disability and I would lose it. The rules are stacked against the employer like crazy. Get one doctor visit in the 1970’s and no further care since then? You are still getting your disability paycheck in the 2010’s. Be a well known member of the near by community and a ranch hand? Heaven forbid the former employer paying for your “bad back injury” from reporting a case of fraud to the Dept of Labor since that is harassment and opens the Fed gov to a lawsuit because only the Dept of Labor may investigate. Decide to move from the state and half way across the continent not because of treatment but because you wanted to? Your employer must pay all your moving expenses back if you decide to take the job he is forced to offer you.
Plus a bonus- You never retire from disability and collect your paycheck until you die.
Nuke the Federal disability from orbit, pull down the broken walls and then plow salt into the soil . As a start.
I bet the next five are even more fantastic.
Just wait until you have so many kids you’ve run out of constitution to name them by.
Then they can name the next one Fuckyou Cutspending
I think it’ll be something else they’ll be thinking about cutting at that point.
Already done. She got her tubes tied after the last one. It’s adoption from here on out.
No sons? Who will run the manor and avenge you after you’re gone?
My son will. He’s 17.
If he’s 17 he may not be interested in avenging your death. Probably more interested in overthrowing you, usurping your title and taking the land and serfs for his own.
That’s how it was, back in my day
He got to wait until sloopy uses his influence and marries him off to some daughter of a landed gentry or a wealthy merchant before he smothers his old man in his sleep.
It should be all good unless he married off his daughters Matrilineally.
This is my ninth daughter, Getta Vasectomy Jones.
Venezuela takes one step closer to becoming a dictatorship.
US CIA meddling, of course
Happy Anniversary!
An article about “Nordic Democracy”, discusses how Sweden’s social programs are more local than federal:
https://medium.com/migration-issues/nordic-democracy-is-not-exportable-5a6adf072249
Every time I see a link to that site, I hear Stan Smith saying “Medium”. Why that got stuck in my head is beyond me. But there it is and it’s not leaving.
‘the dig once bill requires states to evaluate the need for broadband conduit any time they complete a highway construction project that gets federal funding. Conduit must be installed if the evaluation, done in consultation with local and national telecom providers and equipment makers, “reveals an anticipated need in the next 15 years for broadband conduit.” ‘
It sounds like the bureaucracy would cost more than installing the conduit.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/nationwide-fiber-proposed-law-could-add-broadband-to-road-projects/
– Congrats on 5 years
– Dad is a huge Cheap Trick fan. Always been partial to Dream Police
– My mom is starting a business, so I’m encountering the regulatory state for the first time. What a clusterfuck
Cheap Trick was the first band I ever saw live. They opened for KISS on the Love Gun Tour, 1977. I remember the crowd acting meh, really just wanting to get to KISS
My BFF (the one I gave my kidney to) was next door neighbors with Rick Nielsen….on his 18th birthday, Rick comes into the living room carrying a case of beer. Nice guy. And yes, this does point out how old I am, that him doing so was legal at the time…
I remember seeing Suzi Quatro and KISS opening for Hawkwind. (Yes, KISS was new and Hawkwind was bigger, for a moment.) My ears rang for two days.
Will the left ever stop their constant shrieking about sky is falling?
I find it so nasueating i just want to tune out
And then what? What would they have?
In other words, no.
Re Penn St.
What about Baylor?
They’re well on their way to warranting the death penalty. I’ve said it more than a few times.
And for added lulz, the Big XII can replace them with SMU.
Look if the NCAA didn’t care about the time that one Baylor basketball player murdered another one and the coach helped cover it up, then I don’t think ANYTHING is going to happen to them
That was a long time ago. And besides, Title IX violations are worse than murder in the eyes of the NCAA anymore.
Notice they won’t play postseason games in NC because of a bathroom law but they’re fine with that murder at Baylor.
At least they punished the coach in the Baylor basketball murder, with a lifetime show cause order (aka the personal NCAA death penalty).
About 100 dead pythons discovered in Florida home
What is it with Florida and snakes?
It’s meth, crocs, or snakes. Pick your poison.
I wouldn’t be surprised if drugs were involved.
Snakes do drugs?
Krokodil?
*considers a narrow gaze, decides to withhold nuclear option…for now*
The snakes don’t really care for the situation, but what choice do they have?
Har!
Raising an invasive species. Brilliant.
We must not have a baby gap!
The mother from 19 Kids And Counting is now expecting her 20th child
They are still on the NHS waiting list for contraceptive consultation.
*applause*
I happened up this piece from The Economist. It’s about the myth about blacks not getting enough Oscars and racists like Spike Lee yapping on about it (ok not the last part):
“If consumers want their films to reflect the society in which they live—as they do their parliaments and executive boards—it is these areas that must see improvement. And film-goers may have more power to provoke that change than they realise. Hispanic Americans buy 25% of the nation’s cinema tickets. If they, like the actors tweeting with the #OscarsSoWhite, are sick of a whitewashed Hollywood, then Hollywood would be wise to listen.”
I was subscribed to TE for the better of the 1980s right up to the late 90s. I hadn’t realized just how progressive it became.
Oh well.
Wait, aren’t Hispanics white? So by the parameters set by the author they already don’t have anything to complain about.
Unless they’re talking about cultural and language stuff, which is a separate argument (it’s not like French Canadians don’t absorb American culture in the same way the English do).
A guy I knew in high school used to say ‘Americans are glorified French-Canadians’.
French-Canadians LOVE: Pick up trucks, NASCAR, baseball and American food.
In all seriousness, I think it’s accurate which makes the anti-American stuff comical. It’s almost as if Canadians loathe themselves for liking American stuff/Americana.
It’s almost as if Canadians loathe themselves for liking American stuff/Americana.
Whaddya mean ” . . . almost as if . . . ” ?
Hispanics are only white when they shoot black people in self-defense.
Anyway, this past Oscars were not so white.
What the fuck is an “Oscars”?
Did I mistype an “an”?
http://www.oscars.org/
I had no idea they still gave awards. I thought it was a televised coping session where they’d occasionally pat each other on the back and stand to cheer for a pedophile rapist.
All about virtue signaling and very little about producing anything of quality Sloopy. Can’t say I have missed out on anything important considering I bothered with that shit fest for over a decade. I often wonder about the people that still pay attention to that nonsense and these sycophants preening for each other.
No, we dont want our films or parliaments(?) or boards or anything really to reflect diversity. We just want good films and competent people serving us. We dont give a shit about ethnicity. Or we shouldn’t.
You mean judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin? What kind of racist are you?
Actual title of a response to motion in Trump dossier Buzzfeed suit:
“‘Six Ways Buzzfeed Has Misled the Court (Number Two Will Amaze You)”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/29/six-ways-buzzfeed-has-misled-the-court-number-two-will-amaze-you-and-a-picture-of-a-kitten/?utm_term=.ab15155d51b8
That’s just awesome.
Professor tweets ‘trying not to vomit’ after passenger gives up seat to soldier
This is also Mr. All I want for Christmas is White Genocide
Hyphenated. QED.
considered a smug and self-congratulatory gesture
Anyone who uses Facebook and Twitter does not get to complain about this.
Really? *Starts shorting Twitter stock*
*Starts shorting Twitter stock*
Should’ve done that in 2014.
I was flipping through the channels, and caught a bit of him on Tucker. He sounded like a smug asshole. Although, I still give him credit for appearing on a show where he knows he’ll get grilled.
You can’t pass up the opportunity to speak truth to power, man.
Vomit? No. Groan and eyeroll? Most likely.
Missing Cat From California Ends Up in Canada Years Later
Hell no, don’t send it back south, it’s earned it’s place here. It’s the cat version of The Littlest Hobo, the great Canadian icon. Send it back to California and it’ll just get soft again.
Sloopy is playing this all day:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf8ZAMRO1DU
I was close to linking that song, but I just couldn’t do that to you guys.
It never gets old.
A couple of months ago we were sitting around flipping channels and came across The Flintstones. We ended up watching a few episodes in succession with my daughter.
She loves The Flintstones. Talk about the staying power of it.
Derp!
I know this was posted yesterday, but my Facebook feed is full of progs complaining about privacy. The irony! Given they are posting from a site that exists for the sole purpose of selling your information.
So are we though….
Muhuhuwaha!
Good thing I stole all my information from some dead guy…
*registers leonadasiv to vote in Cook County*
Again?
He’s already registered three times.
Only 3?! Slacker.
Jean-Claude Juncker issued a jaw-dropping threat to the United States, saying he could campaign to break up the country in revenge for Donald Trump’s supportive comments about Brexit.
Dumb motherfucker talks about breaking off Texas (understandable, given their history) and Ohio (the hell?) but apparently misses the fact that the only state interested in what a snide Eurocrat thinks is probably California.
I’ll guess that 90% of the American public hasn’t the faintest idea who the hell Jean-Claude Juncker is. I’m probably underestimating.
Isn’t he that 80s action movie star?
No, he’s some Canuck-Frog pron star.
And most of the other 10% know him as “that guy Nigel Farage ripped on constantly, and it was hilarious”.
Of all the political figures wandering the world today, Farage has got to be one of the best orators of the lot. Certainly better at it than the entire back catalog of US federal politicans for decades.
I sometimes wonder if he’s not deliberately aping Cicero. He’s got a similar, if modernized style.
Farage is *one* of the best, added to the fact that he was being given plenty of air-time to beclown himself in the lead-up to Brexit.
Prime Ministers Question Time is still one of, if not the best primers on public speaking, sarcasm and irony that mankind has ever been exposed to. We don’t subscribe to cable TV anymore, and it’s just about the only thing I miss.
Do you even YouTube bro?
I consider myself fairly informed, and I never heard of the guy until today.
He is some 3 bottles of claret by lunch guy that has some ceremonial position in the EU.
New York?
Only the city.
In fact, I fully support the NYC independence movement. NYC should secede from the country and leave New York to the New Yorkers.
Every time I visit there, it seems the words that are always on the tip of my tongue are “No. Fuck YOU.”
It reminds of a thread over in the other site.
Manuel Valls condemned Trump. So then the phrase, “Well, I was going to vote for Trump, but Manual Valls convinced me to change my vote,” is a phrase that nobody has ever said.
So the the commie French president of France hates Trump? How do you think that sells in Akron?
The linked article (at least on my browser, not sure if it’s an inline ad) has a really funny slideshow on Juncker’s “awkward kissing moments” – well worth a quick viewing.
Why Does Reason Have More Sympathy For Sex Buyers Than For Underage Prostitutes?
What Brown doesn’t tell you is who these young victims are. Many of the children and teens being prostituted in big cities and small towns across the U.S. are runaways or homeless youth.
Immediately starts using language that throws away all their agency and makes it sound like they’re being controlled. Classy.
While the man is this story is hardly innocent. All the minors certainly sound like they had agency. And the two prostitutes took the first steps on their own.
http://www.richmond.com/news/local/crime/culpeper-man-charged-with-sex-trafficking-through-sugar-daddy-site/article_b418bd8c-5690-5899-932c-0db2699d4283.html
I thought cops in Culpeper had better things to do…like shoot women in church parking lots.
Field research in nine countries found that prostitution in general, not just sex trafficking, is brutal and damaging to women. Researchers found 60 to 75 percent of prostitutes had been raped, and 70 to 95 percent had experienced physical assault.
It’s almost like being in underground and black market industries tend to make it difficult to report violence to police, and attracts a certain kind of individual. If only there was some way to let prostitutes go to the cops (the study she links to is, of course, not an actual study, but a piece saying this other study says this, with no way to check it, but I’m pretty sure the Netherlands is not one of the nine countries).
Yes, if adult prostitution were legal, almost all the problems she is complaining about would go away.
While I certainly think it should be legal, calling the cops is its really just a good way to be victimized twice. The public will be about as sympathetic as they are to people who OD. Because people are dicks.
Yeah, they also conveniently leave out that in every country where prostitution is illegal or heavily regulated, the vast majority of rape/abuse of sex workers comes from cops. So clearly we just need a law that cops can’t rape or assault sex workers!
Even then though, those stats on rape and assault sound like BS. The tricks played by sex work researchers in defining rape/abuse often mean that they count someone as having experienced it even if the sex worker doesn’t claim to have been themselves. Just like rape studies on college students. Almost like the studies are twisted to fit the preconceived hypothesis…
“Anywhere from 80 to 90 percent of trafficked youth were sexually abused before they were trafficked, and the average age of first time trafficking victims is around 13 to 14 years old.”
She doesn’t provide a source for that. She also ignores that this expensive dragnet is finding few trafficked youth, or trafficked adults for that matter.
The end bit should pretty clearly show that she doesn’t care about inefficiency or the reality of the program. It’s right-wing virtue signalling about these poor, innocent victims of white slavery…I mean, the sex trade and those evil libertarians who just don’t care like we do.
Which dovetails perfectly with left-wing/feminist virtue signaling. So like the War on Drugs, or any other bipartisan pork-barrel shitshow, it unfortunately is not going away any time soon. Neither is prostitution. Making it another perfect government program: spending money and accomplishing nothing in perpetuity.
But see it’s not prostitution they’re taking about. It’s dun-dun-da-dun “HumanTrafficking” which is evil and requires a whole new war to eradicate. You’re not supposed to be smart enough to see the rebranding.
exactly. if any of these sex trafficking pearl clutchers or feminists gave a damn about sex workers, they’d talk about New Zealand. It’s just about the only country which has fully decriminalized sex work, and it’s much much safer there. There are regular stories of cops escorting clients to the ATM to make them pay if they try to get away without doing so, sex workers winning court cases, etc, without all of the violence and abuse experienced under criminalization or corrupt licensing/Nevada style systems.
The Federalist has always had this whiff of moralist arrogance and a weird fragility, like it’s about to either collapse into a respectable GOP mouthpiece or a Breitbartesque Trump-sucking shitshow but it just can’t decide which.
Kiddo with a 39C Fever, so no more commenting. Just saying Happy Anniversary!
Get well soon!
How many killowatts per picofarads is that?
Bout 8 rods to the hogshead IIRC
39C
Is that high? Can’t you translate it to a real unit of measure?
Anyway, hope she feels better. And thanks for the well wishes.
She’s freezing!
That’s 561.87 degrees rankine.
312 K.
I just KNEW someone would break out the Kelvin….
That’s LORD Kelvin, dear sir.
Too late to submit 31.2 Réaumur?
Can’t you translate it to a real unit of measure?
Sure. 312.15° Kelvin.
You’re welcome.
Kelvin doesn’t have degrees. You’re doing it wrong.
Actually, he earned several degrees, some with high honors.
I’m merely dumbing it down for the potential troll-visitors. 😉
If you feel like betting on Donald Trump’s future
(if it’s blocked for you…)
Odds to serve full term: Evens
Odds to leave before the end of his first term: 4/5
Odds to not be re-elected in 2020: 2/5
Odds to visit Russia this year: 2/1
Odds to win the Nobel Peace Prize this year: 20/1
From the Juncker article:
“ayHobeSound
Americans are too docile and obedient to government-corporate power to break away. Trump and his regime of oligarchs and generals are bending Americans over to be fisted by Big Business: repealing wage, work safety and environmental protection laws. Corporate profits first and foremost, even though Trump promised to put American people first.
ReplyShare1 reply+1”
“2 minutes ago
Justiceanddignityforall
Yours is the best comment I’ve read here in a while. I totally agree!
Americans’ standard of living is declining while corporations profits continue robust. Heroin addiction has become an epidemic among college educated young to middle aged adults simply because life has become too stressful. The young here are graduating college with degree upon degree and indebted because of expensive college tuition. They soon find a dismal reality, there are very few decent paying jobs. Companies are offering less jobs and require more from the workers they already have. And in comes Trump to cater to these companies. He couldn’t care less about the average citizen. I despise the man.”
He managed all that in two months, huh.
Jesus. Christ.
“life has become too stressful”
No, you’re just a pussy.
I mean it’s like the Mongols are back. That’s how stressful it is.
The Mongols are Back would be a great band name.
“O noes! It’s the Mongols”
Everything that happened under Obama is now Trump’s fault. Before that, everything that happened under Obama was Bush’s fault.
Corporate profits first and foremost, even though Trump promised to put American people first
Corporations aren’t people?
They’re evil people who dine on kittens and baby blood. I starr all of my PowerPoints with how we’re going to get more of both of those things.
“Americans are too docile and obedient to government-corporate power”
They should have stopped there.
Wait, that’s not satire? He’s saying that from a nation that almost certainly has speech codes, no right to self defense and is losing their cultural identity because their governments have taxed them to the point that they can’t afford children and are relying on immigration from third-world Islamist shitholes to keep their population stable.
That person should be institutionalized. Or given a job by the NYT editorial board.
I’ll say! Just lookit what happened to the anti-war movement during Obama’s reign!
Congrats Sloop and Banjos! It does not seem like it’s been 5 years. They go by fast, enjoy every second.
Not everyone who lives where Britain used to believes the shit their government is spewing about multiculturalism.
Prisons are the number one recruitment, networking, and organizing centers for radical Islam. It something that would have obviously been attractive to someone like this guy who enjoyed stabbing people in the face even before converting. Prisons as terrorist traininging and indoctrination camps was a recurring theme in a book I recently finished about the history of ISIS.
In fairness, a religion that grants justification and a sense of moral superiority for robbers, rapists, slavers, and murderers is always going to be more attractive to criminals than one that grants mere forgiveness.
Most criminals are ignorant, and is the ignorant who are most easily roped into extreme ideology. Of course add that to the fact that they can get away with their fucked up proclivities under the pretention of piousness.
A course of leeches…
Meet the 105-year-old doctor who is still hard at work
Sounds like he’s stuck in a rut.
Happy Anniversary! Can’t believe it’s been 5 years.
My wife and I were honored to be at the ceremony. The bride was radiant. The groom was there too. Hell of a party afterwards. Congratulations to you both.
Thanks, man. We need a reunion of sorts.
Pat Buchanan asks an impolite question.
Is Putin the ‘Preeminent Statesman’ of Our Times?
Everything is more intense with your shirt off.
https://imgur.com/gallery/KfpB6
Rand Paul rails against letting a mountain of negros into some special club
They can employ their famous noir-avalanche attack if there is war.
What kind of person doesn’t want another World War started in the Balkans?
That depends, who would we be fighting?
If we aren’t fighting Germany, it doesn’t count.
Can we fight Merkel on behalf of the German Volk?
The Bundeswehr ain’t what it used to be. I think 100 Hertha BSC fans could knock it out, given enough beer.
Here- a horror story to start your day.
In other countries, when patients recover from a terrifying brain bleed — or, for that matter, when they battle cancer, or heal from a serious accident, or face down any other life-threatening health condition — they are allowed to spend their days focusing on getting better. Only in America do medical treatment and recovery coexist with a peculiar national dread: the struggle to figure out from the mounting pile of bills what portion of the fantastical charges you actually must pay. It is the sickness that eventually afflicts most every American.
What’s less understood is the extent to which our current medical-billing system itself is responsible for the high prices patients are charged. There are, of course, many factors that have led to the United States’ record-breaking $3 trillion health care bill: runaway drug prices, excessive testing and sky-high charges for even the most basic medical interventions. But all of those individual price increases have been enabled — indeed, aided and abetted — by the complex system of billing and coding that underlies bills like those sent to Wickizer. That system, with its lines of alphanumeric codes and arcane medical abbreviations, has given birth to a gigantic new industry of consultants, armies of back-room experts whom medical providers and insurance companies deploy against each other in an endless war over which medical procedures were undertaken and how much to pay for them. Caught in the crossfire are Americans like Wanda Wickizer, left with huge bills and indecipherable explanations in languages they cannot possibly understand.
TL;DR-
Some woman got sick, proving America is a dystopian hellhole.
American medicine is bad. “Entrepreneurial billing” is bad. Insurance companies are evil. Single payer, NOW!
The last time I got a huge bill from the hospital it was because someone accidentally stuffed the bills for multiple people into my envelope. When I called the hospital to let them know (especially since it was itemized billing for services rendered to these people) I was told to just throw those other ones out and only pay mine. No concern about the medical details they’d mailed to me by way of what these (named) people were being charged for.
I mean, in those other countries you may have to wait a few months for that cancer screening while it metastasizes though your body, but hey, it’s “free”!
Speaking of horror stories. I got a call from my accountant yesterday. Seems that the wife and I made too much money last year and must pay the state and feds another $12k for the infraction.
Does that include any punishment amounts because you failed to properly estimate how much money must be cheerfully given to your masters and thus did not pay enough during the year?
I don’t think so – we withhold at the single-no-dependents rate.
“The more you earn, the less you keep,
And now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to take,
If the tax-collector hasn’t got it before I wake.”
―Ogden Nash
He’s no Maya Angelou!
It’s true that the current medical-billing system is a huge part of the problem. Administrative costs have skyrocketed. Opacity diminished market forces. Regulatory capture has run rampant. But the solution is not more government.
American medicine is bad. “Entrepreneurial billing” is bad. Insurance companies are evil. *Single payer, NOW!
*Deregulate now! Get the government out of healthcare now!
‘”It is no longer just available in sleazy stores and distributed in brown paper bags,” said Rep. Karilyn Brown, R-Sherwood, the sponsor of House Resolution 1042. She said online pornography is violent, and is increasingly available to teens and even younger children.
“Its influences are reaching the highest levels of government and society,” Brown said.’
http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2017/mar/29/arkansas-house-votes-call-porn-health-crisis
Way to live down to a reputation as moral scolds.
“Its influences are reaching the highest levels of government and society,” Brown said.
I have no doubt that this statement is 100% true. All one needs to do is look at the browser history of bureaucrats.
This is most well known to happen at the EPA.
I for one would rather they spent their time with that preoccupation than meddling with other people.
SEC laughs at the EPA.
CFTC: “What are we? A December Chopped Liver Contract?”
Increasingly available?
No I am sorry availability reached saturation of 100% a decade ago
Interesting musings by Harsanyi, one of the few contributors to Reason who I still enjoy reading, on Fight Club.
Great… now I’m going to need to rewatch Fight Club again. It’s one of the few movies I watched at least once with the commentary track, and the commentary is hilarious. One of my favorite parts is Ed Norton talking about how Tyler and the narrator meeting on the plane was one of his favorite moments from the book, then Brad Pitt goes, “Wait, they didn’t meet on a plane in the book. They met on the beach. Did you even read the book?”
Highly recommend checking out r/conspiracy. It’s one of the most unintentionally hilarious/insightful things on the web. Every batshit crazy conspiracy theory you can imagine is treated seriously.
You can even see people read one post on something they just said they had never heard of before, and then immediately get on board and start believing wholeheartedly.
Fascinating stuff
/r/conspiracy’s mantra: “The Jews did it!”
Seriously, the Jews did everything in that place. I’ve never had so much power before.
Between that and the weird ancap subreddit that deifies Pinochet I have a veritable feast of lulz reading ahead of me.
I believe those ancaps are simply helicopter enthusiasts.
/r/anarcho_capitalist and /r/libertarian are both awful. Learned to stay away from them.
/r/anarcho_capitalist and /r/libertarian are bothReddit is awful. Learned to stay away fromthemit.FTFY
I’ll make an exception for /r/gingers.
/r/GoldAndBlack if you want the somewhat intellectual non-helio-anarchocapitalism.
This is why I appreciate Alex Jones style over /r/conspiracy’s style. “The Jews did it and 9/11 was faked” is just fucking boring. “BLACK HELICOPTERS AND FEMA CAMPS AND THE SECRET ALIEN DEMONS SEEPING INTO OUR REALITY” is so much more fun.
The pizzagate stuff on r/conspiracy is a masterpiece of crazy. I’m absolutely enthralled by the insanity of it.
I think my favorite meme is someone reading an absolutely bullshit fever dream explanation of a pretty straightforward event and accepting it with no questions. Then that same person reading a very obvious rebuttal and rejecting it with the demand of “that’s not hard evidence!”
The cognitive dissonance over there helps understanding Gawker or Salon
IT’S GOING TO MAKE THE FRIGGIN’ FROGS GAY!
Though for non-Jew ones, here’s a hilarious one that caught my eye earlier
6 snipers? Couldn’t that have just hired 1 good one? Or a Marine sharpshooter with an easy shot from 40 yards?
smh
The Sandy Hook stuff is the only one that legitimately pisses me off. It’s one thing to think the Jews are running the world. Quite another to say 20 some children didn’t actually die and they were acting.
The Sandy Hook truthers are the worst.
I mean… to put it into their terms, these people all think that 9/11 was a conspiracy, and the Jews conspired with the American government to kill 3,000 people.
If the government is evil enough to do that, they ain’t gonna blink at killing 20 kids.
That thing with the reported pretending to be a SWAT cop was bizarre. What the hell was that all about?
A guy who has recently become a personal friend would have been quite happy to have all those /r/conspiracy guys help him out loading gurneys for a couple days in December 2014.
There was a lot of unnecessary secrecy after Sandy Hook that didn’t help. Connecticut passed a bill modifying its Freedom of Information Act to “prevent the release of crime-scene photos and video evidence from the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre and other Connecticut homicides, concerned such records would be spread on the Internet.” The demolition workers who razed the building had to sign NDA’s.
Second-hand scuttlebutt, but I believe it’s reliable.
Very early on, some of the personnel who had to attend the site were taking their own, unauthorized photographs, and the Newtown brass (rightly) wanted that kind of behavior suppressed, because the financial incentive to leak this to newspapers was clear, and the newsies were being particularly insistent. It’s plausible that the ‘unnecessary security’ was simply a reaction to these concerns.
One angle they initially wanted to suppress was (unbelievably) the mental health protocols in CT and the long history of Lanza’s mother working sometimes with, and sometimes against the local health professionals. It’s speculated that Lanza discovered that he was finally scheduled to be sent for evaluation leading possibly to commitment a few days after 12/14 and this was the catalyst for his shooting spree.
Then there was the mother herself, who kept the guns unsecured under her bed. My source didn’t have information on whether she kept them loaded, but allegedly, unsecured ammunition was also found at the house.
Sounds akin to listening to Coast to Coast AM. When I used to have to leave for work at 3 in the morning, I’d listen to that train wreck and laugh my ass off.
Ha. I remember listening to that show coming back after midnight beer league games.
Even the Finland theory? Pretty sure there’s a small amount of people who took that one seriously.
When did Al Lord stop fucking sheep, I wonder?
Five years?! Holy Crap, I am getting old. I still think of y’all as newly weds.
Yes…”getting” old…
When I first saw Nunes give info out about evidence of Trump being investigated, my first guess was that the information came from the White House. Can someone explain to me why revelations that the info came from the White House are . . . scandalous?
If the White House leaked info to a politician charged with investigating the subject of the leak, that seems apropos rather than scandalous.
Someday, Trump may do something really bad. If and when that happens, I hope the press won’t have cried wolf so many times that not enough people care anymore.
From the link:
“Thursday’s report means that either Nunes has been lying to the public or The New York Times is flat wrong on a story”
—-The Daily Beast
Either way, you’d think this is the end of the world as we know it.
You know the next line.
Women hardest hit?
It’s the end of the world as we know it
And I feel fine
Going with the song lyric is less funny.
But you never know with youngsters. They may not have any idea about the lyrics.
I saw a gay kid dressed up as Abraham Lincoln the other day. I mean . . . it was a lumbersexual kind of thing, but with obvious Lincoln overtones. He had a stove pipe hat and a beard just like Lincoln, but the rest of it was more lumberjack.
Somebody wanna tell me what that’s about?
If I’d asked him for the next line after “It’s the end of the world as we know it” to save his life, he might just as soon have respond, “With my mind on my money and my money on my mind?”
And I feel fine?
+1
Regardless of whether a politician omitted the truth or the New York Times was–gasp!–wrong about something, my plans for summer vacation remain unchanged.
Given past history, this is not a long shot (though the sentence’stone suggest the NYT is lie- and error-proof)
But if people lose faith in the New York Times, then what will we do?
its not scandalous but its meant to devalue the intelligence because its being selectively spoonfed to an ‘investigator’.
its nonsense. its the same bullshit the press did with the wikileaks dump of DNC emails = attack the source, ignore the information
My short version read (without digging up sources) is this:
Trump wants rapprochement with Russia for numerous reasons. For one, he wants to work with Putin on ISIS. That means collaborating with Putin and Syria. In addition to the left being naturally adverse to working with people who don’t have hearts of gold (See MFN trade status with China, hostility towards the Contras, etc), the neocons in the Republican party–especially John McCain–are adamantly against doing anything like rapprochement with Russia especially if that means being respectful of Syria and Iran–places the neocons might like to invade someday.
I should, what some people are calling “the deep state” are adamantly opposed to working with Russia, too, for various reasons, including that it infringes on their turf and arguments for future funding. It’s bad enough if the CIA, NSA, et. al. need to worry about other agencies with responsibilities that overlap with theirs–much worse if they need to worry about Russia having carte blanche to do what they want with ISIS in Syria while we focus on Iraq.
Mind you, I’m not saying that any of these policies are good or bad, necessarily, but I think that’s what’s going on. Trump wants to work with Putin on ISIS, etc. the way FDR worked with Stalin, but the agencies and politicians that support them and they’re beholden too would need to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing that. Trump made his intentions on working with Putin clear (to me anyway) long before Trump was elected, and so the agencies and politicians who didn’t want that started undermining him way back when.
That’s what this is all about. There’s been an inquisition on Trump and his relationship with Russia going back before Trump’s election, and it appears that Trump, predictably, tried to defend himself in the court of public opinion by leaking evidence showing as much.
Whether we like Trump’s policy is another question, but the “deep state” is going after the hearts and minds of the American people on Trump’s relationship with Russia the same way that they went after the American people’s hearts on Saddam Hussein’s relationship with Al Qaeda and his WMD program.
the full-length version is actually a mini-series narrated by Lawrence Olivier
What’s really going on and why in 350 words!
I think that’s pretty good.
Needz moar See You Next Tuesdays! I kid, Ken. I kid.
I actually think you have the right general idea FWIW
Its not entirely Trump’s novel idea. And its not just about ISIS. Its something that has been in the background of foreign policy-thinking for decades.
Ever since the end of the cold war, one of the main subjects of US foreign-policy theory has been whether to simply “take advantage of our unique status as the sole-remaining superpower” and try and use that to maintain a permanent ‘monopolar’, hegemonic position.
Some (e.g. neocons, others) felt we should strike while the iron was hot and try and use the moment in history to secure some permanent advantage. Others felt that there are inherent problems with even the appearance of ‘sole-superpower’ status (e.g. you take the blame for everything), and that it would just encourage others to form opposition-blocs by necessity.
The idea behind making gestures towards Russia were in both of our interests, mainly to offset the longer term threat of a growing power in china. It was also to diplomatically neutralize them as they eventually regained their feet and started itching to regain their old regional territory. Its not so short-term as “ISIS”, imo, and far more to do with longer-term ideas about establishing balance-of-power
tho i agree “isis” makes a convenient near-term entrée for both parties;
the problem i think some strategists see would be that giving Russia carte-blanche to play “war on terror” games…. would be immediately re-purposed to ‘seeing terrorists everywhere it wants to expand its influence’.
e.g. once they were given an inch of American support for ‘rooting out Islamic baddies’, they’d take a yard (or 10), immediately utilizing it to discover Islamic terror-cells in all of their neighboring former-soviet territories. they have no interest in re-doing Afghanistan, or diplomatically arm-twisting the pakistanis (that’s china’s problem); even Syria is a bit of a fringe-issue for them, really.
what they want is stuff like ‘the Ukraine’. And if we start offering to be allies, they will want some very large concessions, just as an opening-gambit. There’s really no simple way to going about ‘rapprochement’ w/ Russia that doesn’t carry enormous risks. In many ways its just simpler to keep them on permanent ice, cock-blocking them where necessary, but no more than necessary.
Of course, there’s also the oblivious Obama apparatchik who admitted, hell, bragged, during an interview that they had disseminated intercepts of Trump staff conversations, and had covered it up.
Conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt played the clip of Evelyn Farkas, former assistant deputy secretary of defense, saying on MSNBC’s Morning Joe earlier this month that if “the Trump folks” found out how they knew what they knew about “the Trump staff’s dealing with Russians … they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence.”
And the idiot Repubs are trying to investigate the Trump administration, not the Obama administration, even though it is perfectly obvious that the Obama administration committed multiple felonies.
Also interesting: she’s on the Atlantic Council, a Ukrainian-funded, anti-Russia think tank partly funded by a Ukrainian oligarch, which has also given millions to the Clinton Foundation. See the update to this post: https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2017/03/28/oh-my-president-obamas-own-defense-deputy-admits-obama-white-house-spied-on-candidatepresident-elect-trump/
Swamp evidently not drained yet
http://hotair.com/archives/2017/03/31/avert-your-eyes-ap-reporter-says-sensational-wapo-claim-on-tillerson-not-true/
Jim Goad sums up the whole Russian “scandal” pretty well.
The Russian Deflection
That was an entertaining read. I’ve not read his stuff before, but it reminds me of those Razorfist rants.
Goad is a funny guy.
Congratulations Banjos and Sloopy!
Sloop, that is far and away the best song from my childhood. Thanks for the opportunity to embarrass myself by serenading the office!
(consults map, history book)
Well, Texas is sorta already its own country. and Ohio? well, i think it would do them good to pretend they’re a different country. It would help people in Indiana, WV, see more of the world.
Nobody has more influence over Texas and Ohio than the EU. Lol. Luxemburg or GTFO! That’s their state mottos.
If Texas succeded, I wonder how many states would go with them. I’m in arkansas and I would probably be in favor of splitting off with then if it ever came to that.
I’m from Kentucky and I would also be in favor of Arkansas splitting off
Congrats on 5 years sloop. My boy turns 5 today. While you were getting hitched my wife and I were doing something decidedly less pleasant.
Playing Parcheesi?
Sweet! Let close more streets Atlanta! http://www.ajc.com/news/local/just-downtown-streets-closed-amid-red-mercury-investigation/9xfH610HG8kqOlvNT6N3EP/
It’s the magical sqiss army knife on contraband weapons-grade substances and a shortcut to all sorts of fanciful stuff. No wonder it’s mythical.
I will admit the extent of my knowledge about nuke building all comes from reading The sum of all fears. However, I don’t think red mercury is one of the ingredients.
Too early for April Fool’s I guess.
No, I know of no use for red mercury.Dumb fuckers probably think cinnabar is dangerous.
Mercury iodide is real and red (and like mercury is toxic). I have no idea what it might be useful for, but yes you need significantly more than red mercury and fancy before presto! Nuclear weapon! I suspect an FBI/DOE/DHS/ other 3 letter agent is cursing their luck at trying to build a narrative about nuclear terrorism on the same day that Atlanta’s commute went to shit for the next couple of months.
Boss, walking by my cube: “Whose A380 model is that?”
Me: “Mine”
Boss: “Cool! Where did you get that?”
Me: “It was a Christmas present from my dad”
Boss: “Oh! Is he into airplanes?”
Me: “…”
“My dad’s good at math too!”
the struggle is real
Wait… you have a model of an Airbus?!
[insert ‘weeping bald-eagle’ superimposed on images of laid-off Boeing employees]
Puhleeze. My company offered full employment to all the Boeing contractors that were working with us in our ops center.
that was intended as a joke; my sympathies w/ Boeing and its often-striking labor-force are fairly low.
I admired Boeing when it said it was gonna build the 787 in SC and fuck the union and NLRB.
Srsly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK_OTq5mnmw
That is one Fugly plane.
https://media.giphy.com/media/XrBiWQU23trHy/giphy.gif
the very last dude in the video sums it up perfectly.
https://www.theguardian.com/global/video/2017/mar/31/mexico-authorities-install-penis-seat-on-metro-to-combat-sexual-harassment-video?CMP=share_btn_tw
THE PENIS IS EVIL
The gun is good. Very good.
ZARDOZ SPEAKS TO YOU, HIS CHOSEN ONES. YOU ARE BOTH CORRECT, AND HAVE LEARNED WELL!
Belated thanks for the Surrender link Sloop. It surprised me that I had never heard the studio version because the Live at Budokan version is so prevalent. I guess I’m the right age to know Cheap Trick, but to only have heard some of those early hits’ live (and I think superior) versions.
And I read every one of the other links, consider it an anniversary present. Congrats to both you crazy kids. Crank this up and sing it to Banjos