Gary and Jill

I have an editorial policy that requires me to address politicians by the appropriate title, and with the appropriate respect.

That said - fuck this Johnson jagoff. "What's Aleppo"!?!

Libertarians - we just wanna be free from Government Interference, man - and Societal Norms - and Facts - and having to think about anything but ourselves. OK?

And speaking of the fringe candidates, Dr Jill Stein went to North Dakota to get in on the demonstrations of the Standing Rock Sioux as they try to stop a pipeline - which of course is getting minimal coverage because when did Neo-Americans start giving one single fuck about "The Noble Savages"?

Anyway, from CBS News via VICE:

CANNON BALL, N.D. — A North Dakota county has issued a warrant for the arrest of Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, who is accused of spray-painting construction equipment during a protest against the Dakota Access pipeline.

Stein was charged Wednesday in Morton County with misdemeanor counts of criminal trespass and criminal mischief.

A spokeswoman for Stein said Tuesday that activists invited her to leave a message at the protest site, and Stein sprayed “I approve this message” in red paint on the blade of a bulldozer.

So first, good for you, Dr Stein. 

But then, bad, Dr Stein.  Civil Disobedience is (at least it can be) a very good thing.  But you're not doing it right if you don't stay for the whole party.  

ie: you need to get arrested and you need to pay the fines and/or spend some time in jail, and then make sure you make enough noise that the press covers the thing so everybody can see the injustice of what you're protesting.  Otherwise, you're just making yourself the center of attention. And that makes you a grandstanding asshole, using good people and their good cause as nothing more that chumps and unwitting accomplices for a publicity stunt.  

Get your ass back up there and finish what you started, Jill.

Music

From NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts:

Sam Beam and Jesca Hoop

"Sailor To Siren"
"Know The Wild That Wants You"
"Every Songbird Says"

Bible Bust

I guess we should keep an eye on it, because it's possible that maybe someday, if Ken Hamm can spoof his way thru enough pigeons, he could manage to make it work, but - nah - prob'ly not.

Here's some drone footage from a fairly recent Sunday, about 30 minutes before the place opened.

Now, maybe, the good little Christians were all still at church, but it does seem there could be a bit of a problem considering the break-even number for visitors per day is estimated at about 5,600. That sounds a bit low, but never mind, because it makes no real difference when you only get 10,000 visitors on the whole of opening Weekend. Uh-oh.

Adding to the potentially fatal embarrassment, here are a few pictures I grabbed from The Ark Encounter's website:

Not what I'd called "crowded" cuz, y'know, you kinda need a crowd to be crowded.  And in case you didn't notice, in a coupla those shots, the employees outnumber the visitors - never a good sign.  

Love Has No Labels

Today's Tweet

...has not pledged allegiance to you. pic.twitter.com/s6zPYefWEc

— deray mckesson (@deray) September 1, 2016

Ding Dong

Paraphrase Bette Davis. My mom told me only speak good the dead. Phyllis Schlafly is dead. Good.

— Packers (0-0) (@ShomahKhoobi) September 6, 2016

I'm never gonna celebrate anybody's death, but the news of somebody like Phyllis Schlafley dying doesn't exactly make me sad.  She was destructively wrong about a lotta things for a long time.  And the things she was wrong about - things she led the fight to stop or deflect or delay or mitigate - are all things that would've helped make life a little better for millions of women in this country and (probably) hundreds of millions of women around the world.

If we help women, it's almost automatic that we'll get whole big batches of better men out of it too.

So if such a thing is possible, when Ms Schlafley gets to hell, she can hang out with Fallwell and Scalia, and they can cogitate on why there seems to be such a shortage of Liberals down there.

Today's GIF

Today's Today

Stay Together

Work Together

Get Shit Done

The Logic Problem

This has been making the rounds on Facebook and elsewhere:

Alice, Bob, and Chris are taken to the police station for questioning. Detectives know that one of them is the thief and that only one of them tells the truth.

Alice says, "I am not the thief."

Bob says, "Alice is the thief."

Chris says, "I am not the thief."

Who is the thief?

And there's all kinds of good reasoning going on as people weigh in and suss it all out; and I'm OK at such things, but I'm really not very adept at the Game Theory thing (or whatever I'd have to be good at to get through this kinda stuff), so I just have to take an awful lot of people's word for things, y'know?

And that's OK as long as you've learned a thing or two, and are at least marginally skilled at figuring out whose word you can probably take on a given subject, and who you should doubt - which is kinda the point, but that's more about the politics than logic, and now I'm heading off into the weeds again which should give you an idea what a cluttered jumble my brain can make of this shit, but that's not really the point, but it might be, but anyway...

So here's one logic string:

If Alice is the thief - 

1. What she says is a lie... we have one liar

2. What Bob says is truth... we have the one saying truth.

3. I am not the thief... as we need a second liar, Chris saying he's not the thief is a lie, hence he's the thief... but we started assuming Alice was the thief. So, since we don't have two thieves, we discard it.

If Bob is the thief -

1. What Alicia says is truth... we have our one saying truth

2. What Bob says is truth as we started assuming Bob is the thief... this would be the second saying the truth. We know we can't have two persons saying the truth. Then Bob is NOT the thief.

If Chris is the thief -

1. What Alice says is truth... we have our one saying truth.

2. What Bob says is a lie... as Alice is NOT the thief. We have our first liar.

3. What Chris says is a lie... as he is indeed the thief..... We have our second liar.

So, if Chris were the thief, we have exactly two liars and one person saying the truth, as the problem states.

Therefore, Chris is the thief.

I had to read through it 3 or 4 times before I started to get it, and that brought me to what I think is a bit better understanding of the anti-intellectual shit that essentially gives us a political atmosphere where this is what makes sense to too many people:

*Way too complicated - let's do this instead:
1) Elect Donald Trump
2) Waterboard all three
3) Put them in prison camps where they become slave labor
4) Seize their wealth and redistribute it to political appointees
5) Declare lots of a national holidays to extol the virtues of freedom and enterprise and the entrepreneurial spirit

6) AMERICA!

No muss, no fuss, no need for all that tiresome thinking.

*this was not actually posted - this is just what too many Pro-Trump comments sound like to me

The Trick

hat tip = Twitter pal Monkeyfister

Today's PolToon

Today's Tweet

#TacoTrucksOnEveryCorner

(He was right; here they COME.) pic.twitter.com/ojW3B3dJuJ

— Pin Head (@PiercedSkull) September 2, 2016

This Shit Is Bullshit

I've been listening in on this one for a while, and I think I've got my bearings now.

In short - this is more or less about a ConservaDem who needs to go the fuck away.  I don't want anyone to hurt him; I'm not wishing he'd get Ass Cancer and die after enduring long, bloody, painful attempts to save his miserable worthless hide; I just want him to be unemployed for a good long time.  I want him to live in a shitty basement for about 10 years while he works an occasional odd shift at The Dollar Store and has to eat what he can find in the dumpsters behind the local liposuction clinic.

Sen Joe Manchin D-WV

Seriously - fuck that guy.

In case you haven't heard, Joe Manchin's daughter (Heather Bresch) is the asshole CEO who has blown up the price on Epi-Pen.

Bill Moyers:

According to reports, Bresch got her first job at Mylan working in the factory basement, when her well-connected dad asked the company’s then-CEO, Milan Puskar, for a favor. Later, a scandal erupted when it was discovered that West Virginia University, which had received a $20 million donation from Puskar and whose president was a Manchin and Bresch family friend, had awarded her an MBA although she had not completed the required coursework.

The school president and other administrators were forced to resign, but Bresch survived the controversy and has done very well indeed in the pharmaceutical business, rising through the ranks and at the same time learning how to adroitly manipulate government and its regulations — lessons for which life in a successful political family with its network of friends and colleagues prepared her well.

I guess what grates on my soul in the worst way possible is this: 

The drug is not the issue, the Epi-Pen itself is the issue. Epinephrine is pretty cheap and available as a generic - but the delivery method is the key. The Epi-Pen is amazing, and it's ridiculously effective and easy to use, and it's saved more than a few lives; and it's a great little peace-of-mind thing - and it's patented, which is the key to the whole banana.  

So Mylan expects a full and vigorous effort to enforce its patent rights under US Federal Law - at tax-payer expense of course - but they get to shift the jobs overseas; they get to dodge a shitload of the taxes by hiding out in The Netherlands, and they can jack the price by 500%, etc etc etc. And that little parlay is what pumps enough profit into Mylan's coffers to "justify" paying Ms Bresch almost $19 Million last year.

It's fucking immoral - and that's before we take a look at the campaign contributions bullshit that helps perpetuate it, because it's part of a fucked up System of Interlocking Interests that makes it profitable to hold people hostage while the people who take those hostages are doing it legally, and so, are completely out of the reach of "justice".

That's gotta change.

Like I said, I'm really not wishing for harm to come to any of them, but a well-placed runaway cement truck wouldn't exactly hurt my feelings.

Fight The Power

Today's Pix

Virginia 5th

Go to govtrack.us 

Type in your address in the search box.

Figure out where you are. Get your ass out there and scare up some action.