Today's Tweet

In more than one Sales Training session I went through, they called it the Scatter Gun Approach. Just keep talking until the prospect shows some sign of a positive reaction.

Nationalism predated socialism - at least Napoleon would have thought so - but at this point D'Souza is using words to see if he can get a reaction the same way animals randomly press levers in a box to see which ones will drop a food pellet. https://t.co/PUDKMF9cE6

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) November 23, 2018

A Sight To See

For some, it's a day of want - a day spent hoping for something better; wishing to feel something other than the bleak and barren oncoming of winter.

For most of us, luckily, it's a day of feasting, and reflection, and thinking how good it is to be in the midst of loving friends and family who are glad to be there, and happy to share our good feelings with us.

And then there're these other miserable fucks.

 

We will get through this. We will outlast them. We will make it better - somehow.

It's Climate Change, Stupid

Crisis? What crisis?

Bill McKibben, The New Yorker:

Thirty years ago, this magazine published “The End of Nature,” a long article about what we then called the greenhouse effect. I was in my twenties when I wrote it, and out on an intellectual limb: climate science was still young. But the data were persuasive, and freighted with sadness. We were spewing so much carbon into the atmosphere that nature was no longer a force beyond our influence—and humanity, with its capacity for industry and heedlessness, had come to affect every cubic metre of the planet’s air, every inch of its surface, every drop of its water. Scientists underlined this notion a decade later when they began referring to our era as the Anthropocene, the world made by man.

I was frightened by my reporting, but, at the time, it seemed likely that we’d try as a society to prevent the worst from happening. In 1988, George H. W. Bush, running for President, promised that he would fight “the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” He did not, nor did his successors, nor did their peers in seats of power around the world, and so in the intervening decades what was a theoretical threat has become a fierce daily reality. As this essay goes to press, California is ablaze. A big fire near Los Angeles forced the evacuation of Malibu, and an even larger fire, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, has become the most destructive in California’s history. After a summer of unprecedented high temperatures and a fall “rainy season” with less than half the usual precipitation, the northern firestorm turned a city called Paradise into an inferno within an hour, razing more than ten thousand buildings and killing at least sixty-three people; more than six hundred others are missing. The authorities brought in cadaver dogs, a lab to match evacuees’ DNA with swabs taken from the dead, and anthropologists from California State University at Chico to advise on how to identify bodies from charred bone fragments.


Fun facts:

• We've been keeping good weather records for about 100 years now. Every one of the top 10 hottest years have been recorded in the last 30 years. And in fact, all 20 of the top 20 hottest years have been recorded in that same 30-year period.
• Late in 2017, a United Nations agency announced that the number of chronically malnourished people in the world, after a decade of decline, had started to grow again- by 38 million, to a total of 815 million, “largely due to the proliferation of violent conflicts and climate-related shocks.”

Hope It Was A Good One

It's a little trite, and it gets downright maudlin sometimes, but the tradition of counting our blessings and asking people who're gathered for the feast to express a few thoughts on what they're giving thanks for can be an interesting exercise in Accidental Truth.

Take our "president" for example.

WaPo:

Asked what he was most thankful for on this Thanksgiving Day — a question that for commanders in chief usually prompts praise of service members in harm’s way — Trump delivered a singularly Trumpian answer.

“I made a tremendous difference in our country,” he said, citing himself.


All a guy has to do is not shit the bed - for a lousy 2 or 3 minutes. No one expects great oratory - we just wanna know the president is thinking about us, and that'll help us think about others, and we'll start to think about how we're not alone in the world, and how maybe we should at least be thankful it's not fucking worse than it already is. Or something.

But - of course - 45* just can't help it. He's always going to make it worse, because the only way he feels OK is to make sure others feel like shit.

Beneath a gold ceiling, Trump told troops representing five branches in five countries overseas about “barbed wire plus . . . the ultimate” that was blocking migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. Loquacious and hopping from topic to topic, he debated the merits of steam catapults vs. electromagnetic ones for aircraft carriers and whether the United States was being treated poorly on trade. On both occasions, perplexed officers on the other end of the phone seemed to disagree with his conclusions.

He blamed “the world” for the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, disputing the analysis from the CIA that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was to blame. In fact, Trump said inexplicably, the crown prince hated the death even more than Trump did.

- and -

Asked Thursday whether it was enough to call troops from his palatial resort and later visit officers at a nearby station, he retreated to a familiar boast.

“Nobody’s done more for the military than me,” Trump said.

- and -

He complained at length that a new Navy ship was using electromagnetic catapults to propel planes off ships. He said steam was better and was incredulous the military would consider otherwise. “Would you go with steam or would you go with electromagnetic? Because steam is very reliable, and the electromagnetic, unfortunately, you have to be Albert Einstein to really work it properly,” he asked.

“You have to be Albert Einstein to run the nuclear power plants that we have here, as well. But we’re doing that very well. I would go, sir, with electromagnetic,” the officer responded.

It went on for more than an hour, including the Q & A with the press, and to no one's surprise, it didn't get better.

Fake lord deliver us from this misery.

Today's Today

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all.

Here's a little food porn for ya:

New Rule:

If you're gonna bitch about a caravan of people who're risking everything for a chance to make a better life for themselves and their kids in a new country, you don't get to do Thanksgiving.

Keep Calm

... and pick a little guitar

Bill Frisell - NPR Tiny Desk

Nowhere Man
In My Life
Strawberry Fields Forever

Today's Tweet

45* does nothing - and rationalizes doing nothing with the bullshit about money and jobs.

I don't see why we shouldn't consider this mess a trial run on his full intentions. At the very least, it's a warning - a threat.

You know who would have written a masterful analysis on the global impact of the United States abdicating its morality to subjugate itself to Saudi Arabia in the face of the Jamal Khashoggi murder?

Jamal Khashoggi.

— Ben. No More, No Less. (@BJS_quire) November 20, 2018

13.2 Trillion

Household debt in USAmerica Inc right now:

$13,200,000,000,000.00

Robert Reich:

"Watch your wallets"

Chalk Up Another'n

WaPo:

With the defeat of Rep. Mia Love (R-Utah), the Republican caucus will include only one nonwhite woman, Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.) — who also happens to represent the only stretch of the West Coast not represented by a Democrat.

I think it's interesting that the Democratic party has really started to "look like America", and the standard bitching can still be heard - "the Dems are in disarray" - "internecine squabbles causing party rifts" - etc etc etc.

We're a country that's constantly bickering. How is a Democratic Party that looks like a country that's constantly bickering not look like a party that's constantly bickering?

C'mon. You can have the cake, or you can eat the cake. Choose one.

That's +39 for the Dems, btw

(w/ 2 still undecided)

Wondering

45* is always a little fuzzy on the protocol, so I'm wondering - will he fire the Thanksgiving turkeys; and then kill them, cook them and eat them anyway?