Forgot His One-Iron

WALKER COUNTY, Ala. -- Around 12:30 Sunday afternoon, a call came into Walker County dispatchers regarding someone being struck by lightning.

The Argo Area Volunteer Fire Department responded to the Argo Church of God on Highway 78. When they arrived, they found Pastor Ricky Adams who had been hit by an indirect lightning strike.

Adams said he was about to lock the front door of the church, when lightning struck nearby, traveled through the ground and eventually shocked him. Argo Area Volunteer Fire Department Chief Terry Pickett said Adams was alert and talking when first responders arrived. Pickett added that church members were assisting Adams after it happened. Adams did not sustain any major injuries and did not need to be transported to the hospital.

WVIR NBC29 Charlottesville News, Sports, and Weather

Everybody Plays The Fool

...sometimes. 

No exception to the rule.
It may factual; may be cruel,
but everybody plays the fool.

From Early 2018 - Renee Elliott

Today's Tweet

Just a faint and nebulous inkling.

#ItIsNotThatWeird to speculate that maybe there's just a teensy-weensy little chance that perhaps some people may find it hard to #resist getting a wee bit of an impression that there could be just the slightest hint of a possibility that #DonaldTrump might be a fucking #traitor. pic.twitter.com/bSHzWG58Cw

— Patrick Randall (@PatrickRandall) August 13, 2018

 

Citizens For Fresher Orange Juice

John Oliver - Astroturfing:

Break It Down

Wapo:

In the wake of the far right’s flop and the left’s success, it’s worth looking at how both media and law enforcement have treated white nationalists and those protesting them. Police sheltered the Unite the Right attendees from when they arrived at Vienna Metro station in Virginia, through the rally where they were protected by multiple rows of fencing to after the rally when the attendees were loaded into vans and driven away. That law enforcement wanted to avoid violent clashes is understandable. But contrast this with how other protests are often handled both in the District and across the country. As the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer noted, “In Ferguson, black protesters had police snipers trained on them. In DC, the Nazis get a police escort.” If Black Lives Matter is going to be treated as potential troublemakers, white supremacists should at least face the same suspicion.

Press Poodles just can't help themselves sometimes. "...the far right's flop and the left's success..." - no fellas, the fact that a gigundous majority of us aren't malignant bigots doesn't make anybody "the left".

Yeah, OK, it can be kinda hard to sort thru it, but your insistence on framing everything in binary terms is a big part of your problem - which you're making our problem. 

And that's a fucking problem.

I think we're starting to push you to make some progress towards realizing that sometimes, there aren't two sides at all - that objective fact is a real thing.

2+2=4

Human activity is a big part of what's driving Climate Change

Vaccination works, and vaccines are not causing autism

But sometimes there are many many sides - or maybe we should drop the "sides" paradigm altogether and see if we can get a handle on the concept of 'aspects' or 'facets' or 'angles' - or whatever the fuck gets you out of the idiotic commitment that everything has to be perfectly equalized in order to thread the needle that the Marketing Dept says you have to thread in order to maximize ad revenues because "stoopid people buy boner pills and reverse mortgages too, y'know".

Stop it. 

Just. Fucking. Stop it.

The "Rallies"

What if they threw a Racist Asshole Shindig and nobody showed up?

This is the “Unite the Right”’rally crowd. All of them. pic.twitter.com/flgi9jqZQ2

— Garrett Haake (@GarrettHaake) August 12, 2018

 

Meanwhile, in Charlottesville yesterday:

I guess the good news is that very little happened yesterday.

And there were no military-looking snipers that the cops were really reluctant to acknowledge on top of any buildings (none that I could see anyway) - that in itself qualifies as a big improvement over Saturday.

And I guess the bad news is that plenty of people showed up looking for a fight.

Anniversary

Joe Heim, WaPo:

CHARLOTTESVILLE — There are no visible scars on Charlottesville. It remains a beautiful, leafy town of 50,000 residents with a thriving core, great restaurants, a bustling nightlife, and the cultural and intellectual amenities of being home to the state’s signature university and a major hospital. 

But if the outward appearance is unchanged, those who live here know how injured the city is and how strained the recovery has been. On Aug. 12, the city will mark one year since racial hatred bared its fangs here, menacing a community and a country. There will be prayer services and music and tributes to the injured and the dead. It is being billed as a day to remember and to heal after a tumultuous and often painful year.

Charlottesville has spent the better part of the past 12 months remembering and recovering. It also has been taking stock and placing blame. There has been plenty of that to go around. Blame for law enforcement that didn’t protect its citizens. Blame for the city council and the local and state government that planned ineffectively. Blame for the university that didn’t communicate the danger to its community. Blame for President Trump for not speaking out unequivocally to condemn the marchers who had spewed their racist views.

- and -

The violence of last August shattered the conceptions some here had of their home. There was a desire to look at the white supremacists as invaders and outsiders, even though two of the organizers, Jason Kessler and Richard Spencer, were U-Va. graduates and Kessler lives in the city. The city had to more closely examine what it represented.

“We lost our naivete,” said Kathy Galvin, 62, a city councilwoman who has lived in Charlottesville since 1983. “It is easy to kind of take comfort in all the accolades we got up until that point. ‘Most innovative city, the happiest city.’ But there were many of us who knew that we had entrenched pockets of poverty that were also aligned by race and were legacies of Jim Crow.”

While the process has been difficult, it has also been illuminating, Galvin said.

Podcast

The Professional Left

podcast 

(leave a little something in the tip jar)

Crocs are no more. yay.

Check your voter registration: www.headcount.org - or call 866-OUR-VOTE

Waving money at a woman - I think that one's worth the whole investment of my time listening to this podcast.

It's not that it doesn't happen to men all the time - the assumption being that you'll compromise any and all principles if the money's right. That shit happens to everybody, pretty much every day (everybody's got a mortgage to pay).

The real point though, is that a man pulls that shit with a woman, and it's easy to see how she'd interpret it in a very different way. It becomes the same old story of subjugation - of how a woman is considered worthless if she's not under the aegis of a man. A good little eye-opener for me. Thanks, Blue Gal.

Don't forget the merch

Cheat Sheet®

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Trashed

Knowing this is the state of our existence on Earth's surface...

...does it come as some kind of news that we'd have similar problems in our planetary neighborhood?

Is it really necessary to point out that we're headed for a bad end if we don't stop fouling the nest?

The Kessler Syndrome:

The Kessler syndrome is troublesome because of the domino effect and feedback runaway wherein impacts between objects of sizable mass spall off debris from the force of collision. The shrapnel can then hit other objects, producing even more space debris: if a large enough collision or explosion were to occur, such as between a space station and a defunct satellite, or as the result of hostile actions in space, then the resulting debris cascade could make prospects for long-term viability of satellites in low earth orbit extremely low.[6][7] However, even a catastrophic Kessler scenario at LEO would pose minimal risk for launches continuing past LEO, or satellites traveling at medium Earth orbit (MEO) or geosynchronous orbit (GEO)...
And if we're really serious about wanting to explore beyond our little cluster of cosmic dust particles, here's the kicker:

.. The catastrophic scenarios predict an increase in the number of collisions per year, as opposed to a physically impassable barrier to space exploration that occurs in higher orbits.

So, lemme see - if there's no chain reaction that kills all the tech shit that we have to have just to stay alive - much less go rocketing off into deep space - then the continued accumulation of space junk around the planet will constitute a barrier that we can't navigate thru as we try to rocket off into deep space.

For the one species with a big brain and all the smarts to rise above the other critters, we sure are pretty fuckin' stoopid sometimes.