Happy Birthday, America

Keeping It Real

In honor of the World Cup, I wanted to show a little clip of young soccer players working hard to emulate the very best of heroes.

Neymar Acting School from r/funny

Today's PSA

Holiday cheer, and all like that there.

Today's Today

If you're going to tell people the truth, make it funny - otherwise they'll kill you.

I'm not quite the Libertarian Mr Stanhope is. And based on the bit about everybody paying their share - I'm not convinced he's all that Libertarian either.

I get the point about living your own life and leaving people alone, and wanting to be left alone in return. Honest, I get it. The problem with being Libertarian is that it's short-sighted.

Just sayin' - there are caveats for just about everything.

Happy 4th, everybody.

Today's Churchiness

My default position is that I can do without religion. Churches are too often scams - especially the big ones, which are really nothing more than musical theater.

But I'll give credit when it's due.

Try to ignore the pearl-clutching style of the anchor - as if she's reporting on the landing of shape-shifting lizard people from outer space (thanks, Alex Jones).

"Battle at the Border"? What the fuck, lady?

And sorry not sorry, but the field reporter's attitude felt a little condescending - like she can't believe the producer is forcing her to tell the story of some dirty hippie clergy people doing something inappropriately critical of Lord Commander Marmalade's glorious efforts to stem the tide of the brown hordes sweeping over us from the south... don't forget this is Mike Pence country.

Swamp Thang

Insidious:

in·sid·i·ous

inˈsidēəs/

adjective

1. proceeding in a gradual, subtle way, but with harmful effects.

   
   

   "sexually transmitted diseases can be insidious and sometimes without symptoms"

   
   

   synonyms:

   stealthy, subtle, surreptitious, cunning, crafty, treacherous, artful, sly, wily, shifty, underhanded, indirect; informalsneaky "the insidious bond between big money and political decisions"

• treacherous; crafty.

Let's say you've spent 40 years bitching about Waste Fraud & Abuse, giving the other side (ie: Libruls) the time and opportunity to look into it and point out that while there's a good bit of chicanery here and there, for the most part, government works pretty well, and in a fairly honest and cost-effective way.

Now let's say you want to take advantage of lots of weird situational confusion, and you're openly ripping off the taxpayers for millions.

All you have to do is point out that the liberals have been saying there's no corruption in government - and they've been saying it for years (even tho that's not what they've been saying, but who fuckin' cares anymore) - anyway, now suddenly, those libtards are saying it's everywhere - and blah blah blah.

Call it The Inoculating Lie.

Today's Tweet

This is resistance.

WHAT A HERO:

"Hi, (to Scott Pruitt)

I just wanted to urge you to resign...

This is my son, he loves animals....

He loves clean air...

He loves clean water...

**reads list of Pruitt's crimes/failures**

So, I would urge you to resign

before your scandals push you out." pic.twitter.com/CRETdb13sB

— Kaivan Shroff (@KaivanShroff) July 3, 2018

Today's Chart

From Pew Research:

Events unique to the history of individual countries cannot be ignored when considering why publics are more positive or negative about how the present compares with 50 years ago. However, our analysis also indicates that views of the current economy are a strong indicator of whether people say life for people like them is better today than it was 50 years ago, even when controlling for the demographic factors of income, education, gender and age. Indeed, across the countries analyzed, people with positive views of the current economy are 30 percentage points more likely than those with negative views to say life has improved for people like them.1

In general, countries that are more upbeat about their national economy are more likely to say life today is better compared with the past. For example, in Vietnam, where 91% say economic conditions are good, a corresponding 88% say life is better for people like them compared with 50 years ago. And in Venezuela, where only 20% say conditions are good, 10% say life is better for people like them. Overall, the correlation between economic assessments and views of the past is quite strong (+0.68).

I got ridiculously lucky, but almost 50 years ago, my high school diploma was enough to start me on a 40-year trip thru a career that put me in the top 3% of income-earners.

My kids will probably never know such things firsthand.

I don't know how to fix it. And there's never a guarantee that it can be fixed. But the one thing that will never fix it is allowing government to remain in the hands of people who are determined to keep us from even trying to fix it.

As The Poodle Turns

"Let there be justice tho' the heavens fall"

By way of a tweet from driftglass: "In clear violation of NYT editorial policies, Michelle Goldberg went to rural PA and talked to politically engaged working-class Americans who are not Trump voters. I hope they let her off with a warning."

NYT:

Erin Gabriel was already pretty busy before Donald Trump was elected president. All three of her children are autistic, and her youngest, an 8-year-old girl named Abby, is also deaf, blind and nonverbal, and suffers from seizures. “She has like 17 specialists,” Gabriel, 39, told me. “She does multiple therapies every week.” Gabriel’s husband is a pilot, and until a few years ago he had a job that took him away from home as many as 20 days a month.

Gabriel’s family, who live in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, have private health insurance but rely on Medicaid to pay for treatments for Abby that her insurance doesn’t cover. “A lot of our life is dependent on policy, Medicaid policy in particular,” she said. So she’s always paid close attention to politics, but her involvement was necessarily limited.

Then came Nov. 8, 2016. “It was terrifying,” Gabriel said of Trump’s victory. She worried about the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and the return of insurance discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions. Her older daughter, who is 11, had been excited to see a woman president, but was picked on by her classmates in their largely conservative area for supporting Hillary Clinton. “It was awful to have to tell her the morning after,” Gabriel said. She let her stay home from school Nov. 9.

It seems pretty easy to trace the hollowing out of American journalism.

There's always been a robust tabloid niche, where the enterprise is driven almost exclusively by profit, but it wasn't until the 80s that we allowed "the news" to be absorbed into the entertainment sector.

(Watch Network again for a good refresher; or Broadcast News)

Today's GIF

Constantly on the lookout for that perfect metaphor to illustrate the ridiculous state of our politics (social, economic, government, whatever).

Now all I have to do is figure out what entities to assign to the characters, and just what the fuck that anvil's supposed to be.