Today's Tweet

If, in general, dog owners took any time at all and trained their dogs to even the barest minimums, I wouldn't have a reputation for hating dogs.

It's not the dogs I hate.

That is a good dog. pic.twitter.com/AIQeLIKiDk

— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) February 12, 2019

A Little History

Mary G Harris-Jones (Mother Jones) was a badass in the best traditions of American Baddassery.

Union organizer, civil rights warrior, and all around champion of getting what you want by standing up and speaking truth to power - and being willing to take the hit because of it.

During the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike of 1912 in West Virginia, Mary Jones arrived in June 1912, speaking and organizing despite a shooting war between United Mine Workers members and the private army of the mine owners. Martial law in the area was declared and rescinded twice before Jones was arrested on 13 February 1913 and brought before a military court. Accused of conspiring to commit murder among other charges, she refused to recognize the legitimacy of her court-martial. She was sentenced to twenty years in the state penitentiary. During house arrest at Mrs. Carney's Boarding House, she acquired a dangerous case of pneumonia.

After 85 days of confinement, her release coincided with Indiana Senator John W. Kern's initiation of a Senate investigation into the conditions in the local coal mines. Mary Lee Settle describes Jones at this time in her 1978 novel The Scapegoat. Several months later, she helped organize coal miners in Colorado. Once again she was arrested, served some time in prison, and was escorted from the state in the months prior to the Ludlow Massacre. After the massacre, she was invited to meet face-to-face with the owner of the Ludlow mine, John D. Rockefeller Jr. The meeting prompted Rockefeller to visit the Colorado mines and introduce long-sought reforms.

Today's Quote

I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.

-- Sen Everett Dirksen (R-IL)

Today's Tweet

I don't think that's where the mark of the beast goes.

Sometimes the cattle brand themselves pic.twitter.com/8PL6P7UWJP

— Stone Cold (@stonecold2050) February 12, 2019

Today's Pix

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Today's GIF

The War On Socialism

Cult45 believes the old formula of assigning scary wording to the Dems is how they'll bulldoze their way through and stay in power.

Call it whatever your fragile little ego requires, but Socialism is a pretty great thing when it shows up and arrests the guy trying to rob your liquor store.

Or when it makes sure a homeless veteran gets a hot meal and enough medical care to keep him from attempting suicide.

Or when it sends a helicopter to rescue your neighbor and his family, who're stranded on their roof because of a flash flood.

Or when it takes some of the burden off some old guy struggling to pay for the 12 or 15 pills he has to take every day to stay alive.

Or when it comes in after a big snow and clears the streets so we can all get to our jobs.

Or when it gathers a few bucks from lots of different people so you can get your car fixed after some dumb fuckin' drunk sideswipes it in the parking lot.

Or or fucking or.

So first off, we have to stop being afraid of words, and start using them to turn this shit back around.

EJ Dionne, WaPo:

“We socialists are trying to save capitalism, and the damned capitalists won’t let us.”

Political scientist Mason B. Williams cited this cheeky but accurate comment by New Deal lawyer Jerome Frank to make a point easily lost in the new war on socialism that President Trump has launched: Socialism goes back a long way in the United States, and it has taken doses of it to keep the market system alive.

Going back to the late 19th century, Americans and Europeans, socialists and liberal reformers, worked together to humanize the system’s workings and to find creative ways to solve problems capitalism alone couldn’t. This has been well documented in separate books written by historians Daniel T. Rodgers and James T. Kloppenberg. “The New Deal,” Rodgers wrote, “was a great, explosive release of the pent-up agenda of the progressive past.”

Capitalism is the closest approximation of the "natural order of things" - and that's good - it works really well. But once in a while, we have to reassert the rules to keep the capitalists from ruining capitalism.

Anyway, the short and sweet version is: I have to take in a number of calories sufficient to fuel the work required to go out and find my next meal. ie: I have to make some kind of profit to sustain my existence.

So I'm a capitalist because god's a capitalist.

But part of the deal - the part always ignored by the Unfettered Free Market pimps - is that god also insists on appropriate regulation to keep things in balance. And also too, god gave me a brain that I can use to sort these things out.

• Blood sugar - Insulin
• Adrenalin - REM sleep
• Shivers - Sweats

These are all really great things, but too much of one &/or not enough of the other makes me - uhh - dead.

Capitalism is a good thing, but without a good regulatory system in place, it becomes exactly the problem this country was founded to defeat.

What's so fuckin' hard to understand about this?

Today's Tweet

Fun with Photo Shop

I wanted to see what would happen if I took the natural skin color from around his eyes and applied it to the rest of his face and took away the comb over and hair dye. So I guess this is what donald would look like if he was a normal man. pic.twitter.com/nnMTC1fNJc

— Stone Cold (@stonecold2050) February 9, 2019

It All Ends Up In The Shitter

Virginia has great history - and unfortunately, way too much of that history is all about how fucked up America can be.

We've been working pretty hard to move ourselves away from the shittier parts of our past.

Then things like this come up and we have to deal with the reality of having not properly confronted those shittier parts - how we still just try to sweep them aside and hope the wounds won't fester too badly.

This continues to be a real embarrassment, but at least SNL can find some funny. And that helps a bit.

Are You Sorry?

When your daughter gets rubella as she's expecting your grandchild, how do you explain your decision to leave them at risk?

What will you say when she calls to tell you about her diagnosis of cervical cancer, that could've been prevented, but you were afraid to get her the HPV vaccination as a teenager?

How will you justify your decision to skip the vaccination that would've kept your son from becoming infertile now that he's contracted mumps as a young adult?

And how do you break the news that their grandma won't be coming home from the hospital because you refused to get your kids vaccinated for the flu?

Will you still insist that those "childhood diseases" aren't all that serious; that your gluten-free home-cooked organic cuisine should've been enough to protect them - and it's all Monsanto's fault anyway?

How sorry are you?