45* Fading Away

It's a tough gig. And I promise I'm not just sitting around taking shots, but General, don't you guys have - you know - helicopters and stuff?

The people who know something about disaster planning know there's no such thing as normal.

And they know that a good Hurricane Response and Recovery Plan can survive anything except an actual hurricane.

One of the reasons they know that one really important concept comes partly from the truly shitty lessons they had to learn on the fly after Mt St Helens blew up in 1980.

They had a good long run-up; they spent weeks working out all the little details; they had National Guard troopers ready to roll with all the gear and goodies they could imagine.

Then the mountain covered the area with a cubic kilometer of dirt and rocks and vegetation and critter parts, plus the first installments of almost a million tons of ash. Suddenly all the maps are wrong, and nobody knows where anything is or how to get there even if they did.

So I'm not counseling patience in the face of people suffering and dying. This thing has been a clusterfuck of the highest order; there's no excuse for it; and if the guy in charge is worth a shit, he stands up and he takes the heat.

But we don't have that guy in charge.

Now, I hope I'm just being a little paranoid here, but I've been wondering for a while - is 45* really the president?

I have a bad sick feeling that he heads for the golf resort every weekend because he's being told to stay out of the way.

Judge Roy Moore

Charlie Pierce, Esquire:

On Tuesday night, the voters in the great state of Alabama pushed a lawless theocratic lunatic named Roy Moore one tiny step away from a seat in the United States Senate. Moore lost his job as chief justice of that state’s supreme court twice; on both occasions, he lost it by flouting the authority of the federal court system as though he were Orval Faubus in 1957.


Feel free to judge him harshly (ar ar)

How is it he doesn't know this makes him look like his mommy just dropped a quarter in the horsey ride out in front of the grocery store?

Oh yeah - it's the New GOP. These guys are not big on self awareness. I should write that down.

ProLeft Podcast

The Professional Left Podcast

Some notes:

1) New word - Antinomianism

an·ti·no·mi·an

ˌan(t)ēˈnōmēən/

adjective - relating to the view that Christians are released by grace from the obligation of observing the moral law.

In Christianity, an antinomian is one who takes the principle of salvation by faith and divine grace to the point of asserting that the saved are not bound to follow the Law of Moses.[2] The distinction between antinomian and other Christian views on moral law is that antinomians believe that obedience to the law is motivated by an internal principle flowing from belief rather than from any external compulsion.[3]

2) The Daddy State wants us to bitch about immigrants desiring to maintain their culture so we'll internalized the need for us to forget our own history.

Once you've learned not to remember what happened 50 or 150 years ago or 6 months ago or yesterday, then they can replace those memories with a story that fits their agenda.
(seriously, kids - you never read Orwell?)

3) Here's the Franklin quote Blue Gal referred to:

...why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.

Today's Pix

Click a pic to embiggen

Today's Tweet

That one time Hugh Hefner put a dick on the cover of Playboy. pic.twitter.com/JeVxbcaqb7

— Sam Kalidi (@samkalidi) September 28, 2017

There was always a Plus/Minus thing going on with Hefner.

There's a solid truth about Playboy's exploitation of women and the hyper-pimping of an arbitrary "standard of beauty" that continues to fuck with way too many people's heads.

There's also a very real thing where The Playboy Foundation contributed to some important social progress:

Comedian Dick Gregory revealed in an interview that Hefner provided $25,000 toward a reward that Gregory later credited with helping break one of the civil-rights movement’s most notorious cases: the murder of three young civil-rights workers in Meridian, Mississippi.

Hefner was also an avid supporter of Martin Luther King Jr. and would go on to serve as a significant funder of the Rainbow PUSH coalition helmed by King acolyte Jesse Jackson. (Hefner donated to a number of progressive and legal causes throughout his life, including funding America’s very first rape kit, via his charitable foundation.)

So I'm not minimizing or equalizing. I'm trying to see as much of the whole thing as possible.

Deep In The Heart Of Texas

Dale Hansen - the sports guy at WFAA in Dallas.

And oh yeah - if you buy this shit:

@Seahawks @NFL

THE PROTESTS ARENT ABOUT OUR FLAG???

RETWEET THE HELL OUT OF THIS#NFLBoycott#TakeAKnee#LockThemUp#MAGA pic.twitter.com/ba2iidqljW

— ᎿᖇᏌᏣᏦᏋᖇᎦᏊᎲᎰᏋ (@cjlongoria07) September 29, 2017

...I've got a border wall you might be interested in.

Especially when it's just too easy to find the real thing.

What do you do in the victory locker room? You victory dance.#SEAvsAZ pic.twitter.com/qJoVyG6ZM8

— Seattle Seahawks (@Seahawks) January 4, 2016

Please stop wondering why I call you guys Rubes, OK?

The Buzz

Buzz Burbank (@MichaelJElston) does the straight up news - with that old familiar liberal bias most closely associated with reality.

(Loads of fun with Political Spoils starting at about 13:38)

Keith

Slice-n-dice it any which way - it still adds up to industrialized fuckery.  The only real question is how much of that fuckery is illegal?

Today's Tweet

The temperature is going up.  AGW is a real thing, and the changes in climate are being driven by it.

Please either get next to all that, or get the fuck outa my government.

Aug 2016-Warmest Aug in 136 yrs, tied w/ Jul 2016 for warmest month ever recorded, 0.98°C warmer than mean August temp (1951-1980) #climate pic.twitter.com/Ua12K9LWtJ

— Laurel Coons 🌀🔬 (@laurelaubrie1) September 27, 2017

Trae Crowder

Kaepernick's protest is not about what you want it to be about. It's about what Kaepernick says it's about.

And by the fuckin' way - the only reason "conservatives" are using the word "disrespectful" is because Lee Atwater and Roger Stone managed to teach them not to say "uppity".

Sam Bee

Samantha Bee - Puerto Rico etc

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Korea

Another good Randy Rainbow parody:

Today's Tweet

This is one very good reason why you get up off your butt and not only go vote, but find others who might agree with you and get them out to vote too.

Our little experiment in self government goes down the shitter if we don't do the work.

Just so we're clear what's going on here, the GOP is using its stolen SCOTUS seat to devastate a major source of Democratic political power. https://t.co/0Kq8jG4AtH

— Ian Millhiser (@imillhiser) September 28, 2017

Goin' Deep

I only wish we could take Sagan's poetry and put it together with DeGrasse's showmanship.

But then again, this one's pretty great. Always been one of my faves.

Trevor Brings It

It's wrong to do it in the streets
It's wrong to do it in the Tweets
You cannot do it on the field
You cannot do it if you kneel
And you don't do it if you're rich
You ungrateful son of a bitch
Because there's one thing that's a fact
You cannot protest if you're black