Sunday Morning Middlemonth Links

by | Jan 15, 2023 | Daily Links | 282 comments

                    Well, that was unexpected.

Sorry to be so blah but the coffeeshop is just reopening, the students are just getting back, and it’s been pretty quiet here. The most exciting thing has been fixing a plumbing issue at Spud’s place. After doing some work today, I’ll settle in to see the Lamar-free Ravens get pounded. So no anecdote, no funny story, just, I dunno, Links?

Birthdays today include a guy who did being rich correctly; the original Dr. Strangelove; a pretty excellent drummer and role-model; a guy famous for wet work; the guy who drove the Jews into the sea (just ask him!); the original and best Lois Lane; a guy who absolutely would be canceled today; a complete asshole who was an absolutely brilliant musician; a guy who had evidence that would bring down Hillary Clinton; a woman I will always think of as Edna Boyle; and another talking head worth ignoring.

And with that, I present you… Links.

 

Brain damage actually qualifies you as a Team Blue politician.

 

“Sorry about pogroms and the Holocaust shit. Now gimmee.”

 

“I’m a victim of soicumstance!”

 

But all they show is “artist depictions,” not the actual photos. I sense a cover-up…

 

You have to scroll down a bit to find out why this panic story is bullshit.

 

Hard hitting journalism!

 

I am shocked SHOCKED that New York politicians are grifters.

 

Old Guy Music’s boots are made for walking.

About The Author

Old Man With Candy

Old Man With Candy

Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me. Wait, wrong book, I'll find something else.

282 Comments

  1. Yusef drives a Kia

    Howdy folks!

    • The Gunslinger

      Morning Yusef! You still in the mitten?

      • The Gunslinger

        Just got caught up on the overnight thread and saw you headed back to Commieland. Enjoy the sunshine for me you lucky bastard.

  2. Count Potato

    Oh, no, not a purloined scarf!

    • Lackadaisical

      Allegedly.

    • SDF-7

      This is why Poe never did sequels….

    • Rat on a train

      The real crime is paying $520 for a scarf.

  3. westernsloper

    a guy who absolutely would be canceled today

    Pretty sure he was canceled in 1968.

    • Count Potato

      That just shows how powerful and important social media is. If it didn’t exist, Trump might have ended up like JFK.

  4. Count Potato

    “Israel has to be on the right side of history,” Korniychuk said adding that this is the only country in the democratic world that is not helping us militarily at all.”

    Because it’s their war? I think Israel already has plenty of enemies of their own.

    • Brochettaward

      The Ukraine graft is starting to remind me of holding corporations guilty of wrong think not for anything they actually do, but for what they aren’t doing.

      Oh, you didn’t donate millions to BLM? You wouldn’t happen to be racist, now would you?

      • Muzzled Woodchipper

        I’m about tired of the idea that the most American thing one can do is support Ukraine.

        Seriously, fuck the Ukraine. It’s not my job to suffer so that Ukrainian corruption may endure.

      • juris imprudent

        You are expected to mindlessly and automatically support whoever our govt has declared our most important ally, and equally to loathe with your entire soul whoever our govt has declared our bitterest foe. You are also expected to switch these without noticing whenever the govt does so.

        OBEY!

    • Scruffy Nerfherder

      The problem with paying and putting grifting sociopaths and psychopaths into power is that they start believing they deserve it.

      • Stinky Wizzleteats

        ^This, give a panhandler a dollar every time you walk by for a month and then pass by without giving. He’ll be pissed.

      • Tonio

        And don’t even get me started on how pissy the Dane gets when you don’t pay the Danegeld.

    • JaimeRoberto (carnitas/spicy salsa)

      Wear the ribbon, Israel.

      • slumbrew

        But I don’t want to wear the ribbon!

  5. Brochettaward

    Mr. Rogers asked me to please be his Firster.

    I told him that was flattering, but inappropriate.

  6. Tres Cool

    whaddup doh’

  7. Count Potato

    “Black holes are gatherers, not hunters. They lie in wait until a hapless star wanders by. When the star gets close enough, the black hole’s gravitational grasp violently rips it apart and sloppily devours its gasses while belching out intense radiation.”

    I find this anthropomorphizing juvenile.

    • juris imprudent

      The universe was made in man’s imagination.

    • Trigger Hippie

      In any event, I don’t see a more measured description of the process on the horizon.

      • R.J.

        Disney says “hold me beer.”

      • Penguin

        Agreed. Even as a little kid I thought it was stupid.

    • SDF-7

      Look at this fucker! Honey singularity don’t give a shit!

    • The Last American Hero

      I find it disgusting, especially coming from the so-called “scientific community”.

  8. Count Potato

    “But to make these data sets useful for machine learning, individual humans must first view, categorize, label, and otherwise add context to each bit of data. This process is called data annotation.”

    That’s also what CAPTCHA does.

  9. westernsloper

    Great Old Guy music.

    • Old Man With Candy

      That’s always the most fun part of doing Links.

  10. Tres Cool

    I poured root beer in a square glass.
    Now I have beer.

    • Shirley Knott

      What you did there…

      • Sean

        Don’t encourage him.

      • SDF-7

        What, you think we’re taking sides? Or is that just how this conversation is shaping up?

    • Spartacus

      really should be beer^(3/2) unless you have a two-dimensional glass.

      • MikeS

        Heh. You and your “third dimension”.

      • Brochettaward

        You and I agree on something.

      • slumbrew

        It’s cute

  11. juris imprudent

    You just have to believe.

    The first problem with all this pessimism is that it is ahistorical. Every era in American history has faced its own massive challenges, and in every era, the air has been thick with gloomy jeremiads warning of catastrophe and decline. Pick any decade in the history of this country, and you will find roiling turmoil.

    Yeah, things weren’t really all that grim in the 1840s-50s.

    • Sensei

      Just a small town girl
      Livin’ in a lonely world
      She took the midnight train going anywhere
      Just a city boy
      Born and raised in South Detroit
      He took the midnight train going anywhere

    • Scruffy Nerfherder

      It wasn’t until the modern age that man truly had the capability to extinguish himself.

      • Ted S.

        Why does that sound like the opening narration to some movie?

      • Gender Traitor
      • Name's BEAM. James BEAM.

        I remember the first time I saw this trailer. I just about pissed myself.

      • UnCivilServant

        It’s been so long since I’ve heard that one.

        I couldn’t remember where it was from.

    • Stinky Wizzleteats

      Sure, America and the good times are going to totally last forever. Civilizations and nations can be fairly stable until they, well, aren’t.

      • SDF-7

        Brings to mind the economic theories of the late ’90s / early 2000s, doesn’t it? “Economic growth is perpetual! The old paradigms no longer apply!

        Oops.”

      • Brochettaward

        I’d actually argue that modern society is far more vulnerable to catastrophic collapse than at probably any other point in history. We rely on incredibly complex, yet fragile and highly technical systems to keep us going.

        It’s kind of like the modern military. I can’t imagine what would happen if we were engaged in a high intensity, prolonged conflict. There are parts of the F-22 that take like one year to manufacture (going off vague memory here). Like, molding and making the part takes that long and there aint no plane without it. Our navy and our force projection capabilities are dependent on massive carriers that our enemy can take out with high tech missiles that cost a fraction of what the ship does and which are far simpler to deploy. within a year or less I think we’d have to have completely changed up our entire approach to warfare in order to continue fighting.

      • juris imprudent

        The collapse of globalization is Peter Zeihan’s big thing. It’s kinda funny that the WEF is probably in a death rattle because the system is falling apart all around them. Ten to twenty years from now there is no cosmo class.

      • Stinky Wizzleteats

        See also, Ukraine: Europe and even us have trouble replacing the outdated but relatively complicated crap we send there while the moribund Russian industrial base looks like it can replace their stuff almost at a whim. Yeah, a near peer war would be a problem.

      • Scruffy Nerfherder

        There are parts of the F-22 that take like one year to manufacture

        Longer. I worked with some of the guys who developed microwave and radar components for the F22. The plane is one massively complex electronics system. There’s an inordinate number of things that can go wrong with them.

        Great for the contracting industry, bad for field reliability. It’s also why Russia is using $20K Iranian drones to take out $5M HIMARS installations.

      • juris imprudent

        I love how we never contemplate the economics of weapons systems. Fucking TRADOC.

      • The Last American Hero

        We haven’t lost the technology to make things, and we manufacture more than ever. Not that we can flip a switch or anything, but we could come up with other solutions. For instance, an absurd number of drones. If we were in a peer war, we could drop the EPA restrictions and actually mine shit and open fossil fuel wells.

      • Brochettaward

        I said we’d have to switch our approach. How quickly that happens is really dependent on things outside what is actually best for winning the war, I’d wager.

        America has pretty much always bungled the early stages of any early war we’ve fought. So that would be nothing new. But I do highly doubt the acumen of our current ‘leaders’ and their ability to admit to their own fuck-ups and adjust course in a reasonable amount of time. They are as petty and stupid as they are corrupt.

      • mock-star

        Theres probably something to that. Compare the excess death rate if, say there were no electricity in a region of the US for month, between 1923 and 2023.

    • Chafed

      I was going to vehemently disagree until I saw David Brooks wrote it. Now, I’m worried.

  12. Stinky Wizzleteats

    “artist depictions”
    The true picture is probably too boring for a public who has been conditioned to think everything spacy must resemble something out of Star Trek.
    NASA suits: “No, no, no don’t publish that shit…give those idiots something shiny like they want.”

    • Sensei

      This battle has been fought here before.

      For example, a graph is more useful than a block of numbers.

      However, in the quest for tax dollars NASA stretches presenting data visually well beyond the breaking point.

    • Scruffy Nerfherder

      I could just hear the “doink”

    • Ted S.

      Physics is just a white supremacist construct.

    • Spartacus

      That looks almost exactly like how I got broadsided by some dickhead tourist from Michigan several years ago.
      “Why are all these stupid morons stopped? Just because the traffic light is out? MORONS!” Screech, bam, kaplow.

  13. Ted S.

    You have to scroll down a bit to find out why this panic story is bullshit.

    Relevant

  14. Count Potato

    “GRAPHIC WARNING: Family of a man who starved to death in Arkansas jail weighing just 90lbs after he couldn’t pay $100 bail sue prison after 51-year-old had his medication taken away and resorted to eating his own feces

    The family of a man who starved to death in an Arkansas jail because he was unable to pay his $100 bail have sued after his medication was taken away and he had to eat his own feces. 

    Larry Eugene Price Jr., 51, died at the Sebastian County Detention Center in August 2021, after being held for a little over a year at the facility awaiting trial on a terroristic threatening charge, a felony.”

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11635251/Family-man-starved-death-Arkansas-jail-pay-100-bail-sue-prison.html

    Damn.

    • Trigger Hippie

      The scumbaggery of the police aside, I’d like to say it seems odd that his family was unwilling or unable to put up $100 to bail him out over a year’s time but are now motivated to sue on his behalf but sadly I suspect it probably shouldn’t be.

    • juris imprudent

      But Sebastian County Sheriff Hobe Runion said in a video statement sent to KNWA/FOX24 Saturday evening that “the autopsy said the inmate died with COVID.”

      From a different article. And from another about the Sheriff: In his first year in office, Runion moved to outsource medical care at the jail. Since then, Turn Key Health has provided the jail with medical staff.

      CWAMFA

    • Trigger Hippie

      ‘I have personally reviewed the entire Arkansas State Police investigative file, which includes interviews with the Detention Center staff, Arkansas State Police reports, and the autopsy report, before making this decision,’ wrote prosecuting Attorney Daniel Shue.

      ‘It is the opinion of this office that no criminal charges can be filed against any person with regard to this death.’

      Ah, there’s the murderous rage I was looking for to jump start my morning.

      • Sensei

        He just died.

      • Spartacus

        No criminal charges, and the taxpayers will cough up what is sure to be a large settlement.
        That’s what the state police call win-win.

    • Scruffy Nerfherder

      ‘The county places a high priority on the safety of every person in our jail. We have medical personnel available to treat inmates in need of care,’ Hotz said in an email to AP. ‘The sheriff is conducting an internal review of this situation and hope to know more in the future.’

      Yeah, fuck you. Get the guillotines.

      • Spartacus

        “We have conducted an internal review of ourselves and we found that procedures were followed.”

        Interviews with the detention center staff:
        “I didn’t do it.”
        “Not me.”
        “wasn’t me”
        “Whut? I ain’t did nothin’ ”
        “Wait, we have prisoners here? “

      • Brochettaward

        The last line there is an accurate summation of how most corrections officers treat their jobs. They just want to sit on their fat asses and not be bothered.

    • Sean

      There’s something wrong with that cat.

    • Stinky Wizzleteats

      Nice beaver.

    • SDF-7

      Nice beaver video, Count… in before Q, no less…

    • juris imprudent

      Go ahead and laugh, when that toilet overflows this is the only thing keeping the whole house from flooding.

    • Penguin

      That was good. In a way, it kind of reminded me of a video I once saw of a raccoon. Raccoons are the only animal besides humans who wash their food. So some guy decided to troll them by giving them sugar cubes. Sure enough, they went down to a local creek and started to wash their food…

  15. SDF-7

    ‘Orning ‘ordles — Meh, but given my morning was thrown completely off by having to replace 3 UPSs that all decided to shut off at once last night (I knew their batteries weren’t holding a charge, I suspect they all decided to do a test because of day of the week or something and the test failed so they shut down) in my home office, I’ll take it.

    Two laws of physics in my house at least — Gravity is a fickle evil bitch. If something can fall with the slightest provocation, it damned well will.
    Any cord that can tangle itself around everything else, will — and any such tangled cord regardless of how light and thin it is, will pull the heaviest thing it can catch with it as you try to extract it (see Law One). Bleah.

    One of the Quordle words I kind of wish was one of my seed words just to make me smile in the morning… but I don’t think the letter frequency justifies it. (LR for the curious).

    Daily Duotrigordle #319
    Guesses: 35/37
    Time: 04:22.30
    https://duotrigordle.com/

    Daily Quordle 356
    5️⃣7️⃣
    8️⃣6️⃣
    quordle.com

    • Sean

      Daily Quordle 356
      6️⃣3️⃣
      5️⃣8️⃣
      quordle.com

    • rhywun

      “Meh.”

      Daily Quordle 356
      3️⃣5️⃣
      6️⃣8️⃣

    • Tundra

      Daily Quordle 356
      5️⃣4️⃣
      6️⃣7️⃣

      I walk the line.

    • kinnath

      Daily Quordle 356
      6️⃣4️⃣
      3️⃣7️⃣

    • Grosspatzer

      Daily Quordle 356
      5️⃣4️⃣
      3️⃣6️⃣
      quordle.com

    • grrizzly

      Daily Quordle 356
      3️⃣4️⃣
      5️⃣6️⃣
      quordle.com

    • Penguin

      LR almost bitchslapped me

      Daily Quordle 356
      4️⃣3️⃣
      6️⃣8️⃣
      quordle.com

  16. juris imprudent

    Chargers melt-down was epic but totally in character. Kudos to Trevor Lawrence for the composure to lead that comeback.

    • The Gunslinger

      Oh my, I turned that game on last night just before halftime and the score was 27-0. I thought, well I guess I don’t need to watch this game. The Jags had a nice little run but the Chargers are just a better team. I thought you were joking. No way Staley keeps that job now, right?

      • juris imprudent

        I kinda like the result because I hate Charger ownership about like Clevelanders hate Modell.

      • Chafed

        I have long said the Chargers will be cursed as long as Rivers is their QB and the Spanos family owns them.

      • Count Potato

        I thought the same thing.

        On a related note, I liked Wild Card weekend much better when it was only 4 games. Now, almost half the teams make it to the playoffs.

      • Brochettaward

        Before week 18, only 9 NFL teams had a winning record while 14 were going to make it to the playoffs. This was a year filled with mediocrity.

        We are going to watch two games today where teams are playing back-up QB’s. One team will be featuring a third stringer and the wild cat out of desperation. This was all very predictable when they expanded the playoffs, but the NFL will get people to tune in regardless and make bank.

        I can’t watch this crap anymore even when you are talking about relatively competitive games. The refs are awful and the league sets forth to create more and more judgement calls for them that can wildly swing momentum in another team’s favor every year. You can’t just say to the refs we want you to focus on the fundamentals to ensure an even playing field.

        Last year’s Super Bowl should have sealed the deal for everyone. They called like one flag all game until the Rams go-ahead TD drive, none on the secondary. Then all of a sudden the flags come out on a ticky-tacky DPI call that gives the Rams new life instead of them turning the ball over on downs.

      • The Last American Hero

        I gave it up during COVID on the premise that it would be like watching preseason all year. I was wrong, but I haven’t missed it and I’ve only watched about 5 games since 2020.

    • juris imprudent

      Lincoln vs. slave-owners – yep, even if Lincoln stinks he still comes out on top.

    • Brochettaward

      I saw this video last night. There’s plenty to attack Lincoln on and it’s been done before. I don’t agree with the little I’ve heard Razor talk about the Civil War in the past. He is vehement it wasn’t fought over slavery on the South’s side, and that’s an argument I will never buy into. The South seceded over state’s right, namely one state right, that being slavery. And their rejections of working out compromises on the sole issue of slavery does not defeat that argument. It just shows that there was generally no trust on the part of Southerners that they wouldn’t eventually come for their slaves.

      • Spartacus

        Yeah, five or six (IIRC) states issued written secession proclamations, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, stating their reasons for seceding. Nobody can read those and still think it wasn’t about slavery.

      • juris imprudent

        Sure they can, because they are determined to believe something else. Hell, Progressives are just humans too; all humans can deceive themselves. They just can’t do it honestly.

      • Spartacus

        Too true.

      • Scruffy Nerfherder

        I see you’ve had the same argument I’ve had with certain Southerners. To say that they can be vehement is an understatement. They will get right up in your face about it. They truly believe the War for Southern Independence had nothing to do with slavery.

        My take has always been that both sides were chock full of assholes. The Copperheads may have been the only side worth supporting.

      • Brochettaward

        I think you can make a very convincing argument that the war had little to do with slavery for the North. They were not willing to go to war to end that institution until the South forced the issue. The war wasn’t fought or continued at any point on the North’s side to end slavery. So, they aren’t the paradigms of virtue they are made out to be today in elementary schools across the country. I will watch Razor’s video, but with a grain of salt. There is plenty to attack Lincoln on.

        I see almost no credible argument that the war was fought for much beyond slavery on the South side.

      • Tundra

        Good take.

        I do think there were economic factors beyond slavery, but there are very few good guys in the whole story.

      • juris imprudent

        The economic factors were tied to slavery, that’s part of the issue. Which is what makes the whole American economy in total depended on slavery a bullshit argument – the Civil War was fought because the country was split: socially, morally and economically.

      • juris imprudent

        I should add that Calhoun’s argument against the tariff system was largely correct – it did favor one faction of the country.

      • Scruffy Nerfherder

        I see almost no credible argument that the war was fought for much beyond slavery on the South side.

        They may have had other reasons, but none that amounted to anything. The plantation owners exploited both their slaves and the other Southerners who died for the plantation owners’ cause.

      • Penguin

        It’s complicated.

      • mock-star

        The way it was always explained to me is that

        The southern aristocracy fought the Civil War to protect the institution of slavery.
        The northern aristocracy fought the Civil War to end secession.
        The southern lower classes fought the Civil War because, Holy Shit! Theres an invading army outside!
        The northern lower classes fought the Civil War because they didnt have 600 dollars to get out of the draft,

      • The Last American Hero

        It goes beyond that. The South wanted the US to conquer Mexico and the Carribean to build more slave states and block any possibility of future changes to the Constitution to end slavery and the election of James Buchanan was essentially a way to stave off the Civil War by putting someone in the White House that had been out of the country while the slave issue became ever more divisive.

      • juris imprudent

        The South knew from the Northwest Ordinance on that slavery was doomed as the country expanded, it was all rearguard action.

  17. rhywun

    George Santos ate my homework.

    • Brochettaward

      The complaints are stupid and without basis. It’d be little different than if I went up to some artist and asked them to do something in an artist’s style. You can’t copyright a style, nor should you be able to and humans imitate the shit out of each other in all forms of art.

    • rhywun

      That is quite a punch-face.

      The goal of the project was always to gift the book to the two children of his friends, who both liked it, Reshi added.

      So it just put itself up for sale on Amazon? Douche.

      • R C Dean

        Well, it is an AI product. Maybe the AIs listed it on Amazon.

  18. The Late P Brooks

    It’s called the suicide lane for a reason.

  19. The Late P Brooks

    Kudos to Trevor Lawrence for the composure to lead that comeback.

    That sort of composure is unique in a girl that age.

    • juris imprudent

      His hair isn’t much longer than Justin Herbert’s. They should be replacing Polamalu in the Head and Shoulders commercials.

      • Brochettaward

        Polamalu wasn’t a coddled, overhyped player who the league had done everything in its power to see succeed.

        Both those guys have the physical gifts. Neither has the mental make-up to be truly great. And for that, they should not get to mark-it me Head and Shoulders.

    • KK the Porcine Pearl-Eater

      I can’t stop watching

    • Grumbletarian

      Needs more Yakety Sax

    • juris imprudent

      Must be a mud-jedi monk.

    • Spartacus

      I already have a portable audio player. It also lets me talk to other people on those rare occasions when I want to, lets me send others (and them to me) emails or text messages, helps me find places on a map, and does a bunch of other stuff. Why would I want ANOTHER thing to keep track of, just for music? If it’s better sound quality then users will have to spring for high-end headphones/ear buds as well.

      • Nephilium

        It’ll have a 3.5 mm audio jack?

    • Brochettaward

      The Congressional Review Act allows members of Congress to introduce a Joint Resolution of Disapproval to reverse any agency rule or action they deem unconstitutional.

      I wouldn’t hold my breath…

      I’m curious how many times any rule made by the administrative state has been overruled by Congress with this act.

    • creech

      But haven’t we been told the 2nd only applies to the military weapons used by foot infantry at the time the Constitution was adopted? I recall there were braced weapons used during Revolution. They were called amussettes.

  20. Sensei

    He’s a good guy, trust him to do the right thing.

    Garland projects a thoughtful and judicious demeanor that is bolstered by his lengthy time on the bench, but there is another, less well-recognized side to his career — one that reflects a penchant for finding the spotlight and acting with self-assuredness. Through interviews with nearly 20 people who have known Garland throughout his life — including friends and acquaintances from high school, college and law school; former clerks; and former colleagues in the Justice Department and on the bench — a portrait begins to form. Granted anonymity in many cases to candidly discuss the attorney general, they describe a man who is cautious but decisive when the time comes, moderately liberal but not dogmatic, politically engaged in private but neither partisan nor outcome-oriented in his professional life

    The Merrick Garland You Don’t Know

    • Stinky Wizzleteats

      He’s a motherfucking hyperpoliticized douchebag of a tool and a real piece of shit, up there with the worst of the worst AGs.

    • rhywun

      OFFS!

    • R C Dean

      What a tongue-bath. Every bit of that is refuted by the way he has treated the January 6 prosecutions, and the antifa prosecutions.

      • Count Potato

        “antifa prosecutions”

        Is that more like hen’s teeth or military intelligence?

    • juris imprudent

      And I’m sure he’s not bitter in the slightest at being denied a Supreme Court seat.

  21. Tundra

    Good morning, Old Man!

    Israel supplying the Nazis is a twist I did not see coming.

    Also, if you spend $520 on a scarf you deserve whatever befalls you.

    The Bottle Rockets are a wonderful band.

  22. rhywun

    Pretty brave of The New Yorker to publish a piece that is modestly critical of that crook.

  23. PieInTheSky

    Communism is the doctrine in which liberates the working class from the oppression of the bourgeois.

    Socialism is the economic mode of production in a communist society in which the workers own the means of production. Read engles please

    https://twitter.com/aveonthesupreme/status/1614620038773743621

    • juris imprudent

      Read engles please

      Man that is just perfect.

      • PieInTheSky

        Upper case letters are a tool of the bourgeoisie

      • rhywun

        Spelling, too.

      • PieInTheSky

        and question marks apparently

  24. The Late P Brooks

    Watching the Chargers snatch defeat from the jaws of victory kind of reminded me of the old Denver Broncos.

  25. The Late P Brooks

    Communism is the doctrine in which liberates the working class from the oppression of the bourgeois.

    To be replaced by the oppression of the nomenklatura.

    • R C Dean

      Who were previously haute bourgeoisie.

    • Spartacus

      The post from Musical Instruments below it is exactly why I miss the Gong Show.

    • rhywun

      Apparently the American Dream means free food at work and making people call you “they”.

    • Brochettaward

      If they are really an AI expert, they shouldn’t have that much trouble finding a new job. But something tells me they weren’t that good at the work or they wouldn’t have been let go in the first place.

      • juris imprudent

        Dude, NPR. This is capitalist oppression piled on top with imperialist oppression.

    • Brochettaward

      What the fuck are coptic atheists?

    • creech

      Had the Romans had firearms, no telling what we’d all be wearing today.

    • Tundra

      French roast.

      Sublime.

      • PieInTheSky

        I remember when I used to drink bad coffee

      • Tundra

        You are high.

        There are only degrees of good,

      • PieInTheSky

        not with coffee. single origin fresh roasted by a good hipster roaster (under a month) light roast. that is good coffee. the rest is bad.

      • Scruffy Nerfherder

        I went to breakfast this morning at a independently owned restaurant that serves very good coffee and makes a mean omelet.

        A couple of hipster assholes walked in for breakfast carrying their Starbucks cups. I would have thrown them out.

      • PieInTheSky

        fake hipsters. real hipsters would never drink Starbucks

      • Nephilium

        Back in the late 90’s/early 00’s, when the craft beer thing was just recovering from the crash, there was a brewery in a CLE suburb. The area they were in was saturated by general bars, and they kept needing to explain to people they didn’t have Bud, Miller, or Coors. Eventually they started stocking it (and charging more then the nearby bars), but forcing those who ordered it to drink it out of a brown paper bag.

      • Nephilium

        Don’t be so sure about that Tundra. I’ve had some terrible coffee over the years.

      • Brochettaward

        Coffee hipsters are worse than audiophiles who are already the worst.

        My taste buds are not refined enough to tell any great difference between ordinary coffee and hipster coffee.

      • Nephilium

        I sure as shit can tell the difference between coffee that’s been sitting on the warmer for 8 hours and one that was just brewed. I’ve had enough I can usually at least nail down the region.

        Bad habits should be done well.

      • Scruffy Nerfherder

        It’s easy to tell. Roast the beans until it tastes like burnt ass, then it’s hipster coffee.

      • PieInTheSky

        Hipster roasts are light so no burnt raste what are you on about?

      • Scruffy Nerfherder

        Maybe Romanian hipsters.

        American hipsters burn their coffee like they add hops to their beer.

      • PieInTheSky

        In europe italians birn theit coffee. Italian coffee is as overrated as belgian beer

      • creech

        That’s why I like my coffee only in coffee ice cream.

      • R.J.

        I wish to have a 7-11 coffee center in my garage, branded glass carafes and all. It would be for long work days.

    • Old Man With Candy

      Some single-origin Ethiopian coffee right now. Tonight, likely something local and grape-based.

      • PieInTheSky

        “Our pairing suggestions:

        Pepper steak, pasta with hearty red style sauces, and veggie pizza.”

        You on the veggie pizza side i assume

        This is the forst time i saw residual sugar given as percentage. Weird.

  26. The Late P Brooks

    Crisis in greenie land

    Recent days have seen senior Greens politicians scrambling to try to explain their position or to deflect blame onto RWE or onto the party’s partners in the coalition government.

    Habeck argues that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has forced Germany to reboot coal plants and that the coal must come from somewhere. It’s a “painful compromise that has truly been difficult for me in the past year. But it had to be that way to ensure energy security in Germany,” he said in a video shared on social media.

    Their position on coal is just one of the sacred cows the Greens have had to sacrifice as they try to steer Europe’s biggest economy through the energy crisis. Habeck has commissioned a handful of new terminals to import liquefied natural gas and has extended the lives of Germany’s nuclear power facilities. The latter extension, despite being just a few months long, has led to much soul-searching within the party.

    Economy Ministry officials point out that RWE won an extensive legal battle to secure its right to destroy Lützerath. That means the only option to save the village would have been an expensive compensation payment to the company.

    They also note that European regulation caps the overall emissions from coal, so the mine expansion won’t lead to increased total emissions as some activists have claimed. That position was backed up by one of Germany’s leading climate economists, Ottmar Edenhofer, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research: “The bottom line is that no additional climate-damaging gases are released into the atmosphere. Even if Lützerath is dredged, coal has no future.”

    Religious fanatics are poor negotiators. Compromise is just a shortcut to Hell.

    • rhywun

      Lame. You’re supposed to “convince” the people to freeze to death for The Cause, Grüne.

  27. The Late P Brooks

    But for Luisa Neubauer, a Greens member who is a leading figure in Thunberg’s Fridays For Future climate movement, the message for her party was clear: many of their voters have had quite enough of compromise. She questioned how the Greens’ “realpolitik” could survive if it meant deploying police against environmentalists to defend a coal company.

    Back to the lunatic fringe. Time to study bomb-making.

    • Count Potato

      “inadvertent starfish”

      That’s the name of my new mathcore project.

  28. juris imprudent

    [snort]

    Buchanan in a 2003 article reminded readers that, while free trade may now be a dogma of many on the right and left, Alexander Hamilton used tariffs to end American dependence on Europe — by World War I, we were the wealthiest nation on Earth with the highest standard of living, producing 96 percent of what we consumed and exporting 8 percent of our GNP.

    Praise of Hamilton from a populist? At a time when Hamilton was becoming the darling of the progressive sphere. We still have very little dependence on exports, unlike a lot of other countries.

    • Scruffy Nerfherder

      We export the dollar now.

      • Nephilium

        And US debt, don’t forget exporting US debt.

      • Scruffy Nerfherder

        Same difference.

    • Count Potato

      We do have a huge dependence on imports though.

      • juris imprudent

        Because we can trade silly little pieces of paper for them, cheap.

    • rhywun

      normalizing homosexuality would cause a “dual-track system in which ‘marriage’ is reduced to a bare transactional relationship

      Behold our magical powers to turn the heteros. 🙄

      Or… wait for it… maybe the heteros started giving up on marriage all on their own.

      • Brochettaward

        Allowing the gays to marry reduced the value of marriage. It is an ironclad law that when you increase the supply of something, you diminish its value, rhywun.

        My theoretical marriage which was never going to happen is now worth nothing.

      • juris imprudent

        Yeah, Buchanan is such a hypocrite. Blames everyone else for failing to have children when he and his wife chose to be childless. I guess he blames gays the most because of the usual reason.

    • creech

      Back in those days, however, the U.S. had no income tax skimming off 20%+.

    • PieInTheSky

      I am sure the tarrifs were the cause. No other countries tried those.

  29. The Late P Brooks

    Today, in Annoying Story Headlines :

    FOX: “Laptop buying guide- 5 things to know before investing”

    Investing?

    INVESTING?

    We’d be a lot better off if more people in the world understood the difference between an investment and an expense.

    • R C Dean

      If you’re using it to generate income, isn’t it capital equipment and thus an investment?

      • Mojeaux

        Yes, but I don’t claim it as a capital expenditure or depreciate it.

        Had a free consultation with a financial planner, and as soon as we told him we’d just bought me a new computer, he jumped on us for wasteful spending. “Did you miss the part where my old one was 8 years old, it was failing rapidly, and I make my living with this thing?” He deliberately missed it, in fact. We didn’t go back to that guy.

  30. Brochettaward

    Mike Vick called out Lamar Jackson. Said put on a brace and play. Sean Payton said he doesn’t think Lamar will be in Baltimore next year, building is grumbling.

    Jackson knows the only way he gets what he wants contract wise, fully guaranteed like Watson, is to create a bidding war like Watson. So, he isn’t as dumb as I thought. He needs FA or a trade. Ravens will never give it to him, especially after this.

    • Nephilium

      His contract is up. The Ravens could franchise tag him or resign him, but I don’t think his missing 6 games (including a playoff game) will really help his case. Maybe the Bears will go after him?

      • Brochettaward

        The Bears already have a Lamar Jackson clone, so what would be the point? If they’re making a QB move, it’s dumping Fields and using the top pick to get a guy on his rookie contract for 5 years.

        Someone will pay Lamar if he’s up for trade. Teams are that desperate. There are red flags everywhere and I still suspect he has an STD or something weird because he missed games throughout last season over mysterious illness. He’s Uncle Ron Mexico 2.0! Ravens also questioned his work ethic for the first time recently through their local beat writer.

      • The Hyperbole

        For someone who hates the NFL you certainly pay a lot of attention to it.

      • Brochettaward

        I also pay attention to progressive talking points emanating out of CNN. I must really love CNN!

        I don’t watch CNN. Or much of the NFL these days. I visit ESPN once in a while and frequent one football news site. So I’m up to date on the latest nonsense.

      • MikeS

        Familiarity breeds contempt.

    • PieInTheSky

      How many rings he got? I dont know american football that well.

  31. The Late P Brooks

    Paging Sensei

    If asked to list Toyota’s most important heritage vehicles, you might jot down the mighty twin-turbo Mk IV Supra, the unkillable Hilux pickup truck, the wafting Toyota Century (Japan’s only production V-12), or perhaps the million-dollar 2000GT. However, the most famous Toyota of all time is an underpowered hatchback with pop-up headlights and a speed warning chime that comes on if you exceed 64 mph. At this year’s Tokyo Auto Salon, Toyota moved to preserve the heritage of this little car, building a pair of restomods at great expense: one powered by liquid hydrogen, the other with a battery and electric motor.

    ——-

    AE86s made for popular race and rally cars, for the same reasons that the first- and second-generation Ford Escorts were popular in Europe. An 86 was cheap, it was easy to hammer back together after a shunt, and the handling was lively. One of the engineers during development was Nobukai Katayama, who came from a background in Toyota Motorsport, so the 86 had been bred to transcend its humble roots.

    Even so, we’re talking about a car with scarcely 128 horsepower on high-octane JDM fuel. Where the AE86 really came into its own was in manga, the serialized graphic novels that are ubiquitous in Japan.

    I still can’t find any useful info on what “hydrogen fuelled” means. Is it liquified? How do you maintain the temperature and pressure needed (not just on this car, but any hydrogen ICE)? It says specifically the concept car is not powered by a fuel cell.

    The electric one has a manual transmission, it says.

  32. The Late P Brooks

    Speaking of Toyota, does anybody else find it amusing that they have a model called the Crown?

    • PieInTheSky

      No.

    • Gender Traitor

      I’ve long thought the dumbest auto model name ever was the Chevy Citation. I half expected the follow up would be the Chevy Collision.

      • juris imprudent

        No love for the No va?

      • Sensei

        I’ve plenty of complaints with GM, but on that one I think they get crapped on for no reason.

        Nova as “new” isn’t exactly foreign to Romance languages.

      • juris imprudent

        Yeah I was going back to the mis-alliteration of no go in Spanish.

  33. The Late P Brooks

    This occurred to me, just now. I wonder what sort of playoff bonus Bosa has in his contract. Maybe that’s why he was so overwrought at the end of the game. Next time, maybe he won’t make dumb mistakes.

  34. The Late P Brooks

    a piece of engineering masturbation like this BMW.

    Come back, Shane Rube Goldberg!

  35. hayeksplosives

    Testing 1 2 3

    I keep getting “internal server error”. Am I in Glib jail?

    • Brochettaward

      You were banned for not specifically saying how much you appreciate/love The Bro last night.

      • hayeksplosives

        Take a number and get in line with the other guys who want me to suck their cocks.

      • Brochettaward

        You haven’t even bought me dinner.

        I provide Firsts which are nourishment for your soul.

      • hayeksplosives

        Genuine LOL

      • Sean

        L O L

    • hayeksplosives

      Yep. Some weird filter is going on. My intended comment was pure text, no linkies no formatting.

      Just commenting on the current conflict in a southeastern steppe area of Europe.

      Maybe the fact that I happen to think that the government (not the individual people) of Ukraine is corrupt and totally unworthy of American dollars and lives causes WordPress to freak out.

      Whatevs. Avoid foreign entanglements.

      • Nephilium

        The Internal Server error appears (to my untrained eye) to be something going on with the spam filtering timing out/hanging when certain words are used in certain orders. Changing the word order, or adding some formatting sometimes allows the comment through.

    • R.J.

      Past two days it has been odd. Lots of slowdowns, occasional lockup. And I also had an internal server error. It is in various places so I know it isn’t my wifi.

      I blame communists.

  36. Fourscore

    I am waiting for a phone call that I know will never come

    • Gender Traitor

      ::gives 4(20) another e-hug::

      • hayeksplosives

        Can there ever be enough e-hugs?

        (Joins in)

    • KK the Porcine Pearl-Eater

      Hi 4×20. Holding you in my heart

    • Fourscore

      Thanks, Glib ladies.

    • Old Man With Candy

      Dude. Did Swiss contact you about us coming by for support?

      • Fourscore

        Yes, I answered him this morning. Glibs are always welcome.

    • Mojeaux

      Fourscore, I hope you know how much you are loved and cherished. Would that I could do more than offer you virtual hugs.

      • Fourscore

        Thanks, Moj, much appreciated

  37. The Late P Brooks

    If you’re using it to generate income, isn’t it capital equipment and thus an investment?

    How many people can really say that? In the context of that headline/article, I say “buying” is the appropriate term, not “investing”. One of my many linguistic peeves.

  38. The Late P Brooks

    Dead-enders, form a line

    It’s early morning at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C.,
    and Ana Valdez is already hard at work at one of the international gates.

    “Hello everybody. Welcome,” she shouts with a big smile as arriving travelers flood through two large swinging doors. “Do you like to help the CDC to find new variants for COVID?”

    Valdez works for a year-old program that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently expanded to try to spot new variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, coming into the country.

    The most recent expansion was prompted by China’s abrupt decision to abandon its zero-COVID policy. The resulting massive surge of infections there is raising fears the move could spawn a new, even more dangerous strain.

    “It will take 35 seconds of your time. It’s free. It’s voluntary. It’s anonymous,” Valdez announces. “Thirty-five seconds of your time.” The samples are pooled and sent off-site for PCR analysis with no identifying information on the volunteers. The point of the research is solely to identify any viral variants in the samples — not to see if a particular passenger has COVID.

    ——-

    But many scientists doubt that China poses a particular risk right now for generating threatening new COVID variants — the newest hyper-transmissible variant taking over in the U.S. at the moment is an omicron subvariant known as XBB.1.5, which originated in New York.

    “So far we have no evidence that there are variants of concern that we haven’t seen already,” says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “And I’m not sure that China poses the great risk for new variants, necessarily.”

    Although China’s population of 1.4 billion gives the virus many chances to mutate, “there’s not a lot of population-based immunity — which would be what would drive new mutations,” Osterholm says.

    STFU you blithering imbecile.

  39. juris imprudent

    Wife has some old Shirley Temple movie on with some seriously incorrect representations of Native Americans. [dalek voice] CANCEL, CANCEL!

    • Ted S.

      Susannah of the Mounties? That’s the one where she gets high on the drug her Indian friend has her smoke.

      • juris imprudent

        That was the ending!

      • Ted S.

        It’s also a reprise of an earlier scene in the movie, which is why it works as the ending.

  40. hayeksplosives

    What’s a good song for internal brooding about suppressed love? Not unrequited love, but unfulfilled due to other obligations and yet mutually understood.

    Does such a song exist? Snow Patrol comes close with “Run” but it’s not really a musical triumph, is it?

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AOBs8dU4Pb8

    • hayeksplosives

      Ok, never mind. “Run” is a near perfect match.

      • Tundra

        Semisonic’s Act Naturally might work as well.

      • Yusef drives a Kia

        Closing time works too,

      • hayeksplosives

        I do love me some semisonic. 👍once a Minnesotan, always a Minnesotan 🤣

    • EvilSheldon

      Try the Still Life album, by Fates Warning.

      • hayeksplosives

        Thanks! Will definitely look that up. Completely new artist and album to me.

        (Not up with the arts scene)

    • Nephilium

      Sarah or Yes, It’s True

      Both by the Slackers. Vic Ruggiero has said that when he’s writing sad songs, it’s because he’s in a good mood and life is going well. It’s when he’s writing happy sounding songs he’s in a bad spot.

    • Ted S.

      Endless Love?

      The movie isn’t about love, but obsession. It’s also one of the great unintentional comedies. You can see the point in the movie where it suddenly goes careening off the rails.

  41. The Late P Brooks

    What’s a good song for internal brooding about suppressed love?

    This one?

    • hayeksplosives

      Lol, yeah nah.

      • Gender Traitor

        This came to mind, but might not be an ideal fit.

      • hayeksplosives

        Damn. That’s. That’s really close.

      • Gender Traitor

        Beats the hell out of “Torn Between Two Lovers,” which I won’t link because I’m not THAT cruel. (Though it’s not as bad as “I’ve Never Been to Me.”)

  42. Yusef drives a Kia

    Ahhh, day drinking,
    On such a winters day,

    • MikeS

      Stopped into a bar
      I passed along the way
      Well, I got up on my stool
      And I begin to pay
      You know the ‘tender like the coin
      He knows I’m gonna stay
      California day drinkin’
      On such a winter’s day

      • Yusef drives a Kia

        Tomorrow Wendys ashes finally head out to sea,
        Right where she wanted to be.
        Then I move on for good.

      • MikeS

        Bittersweet. I hope you have a peaceful day.

      • hayeksplosives

        Hugs and well wishes!

      • Yusef drives a Kia

        Thanks both you guys! Im driving down to the coast from Phelan, into the mouth of hell.

    • Ted S.

      You’re drinking beer at noon on Sunday in a bar that faces a giant car wash?

      • MikeS

        I can’t believe you didn’t link that song for the 17th time.

      • Yusef drives a Kia

        Oh hell no, not that

      • Ted S.

        Unlike you, I link to good songs.

      • Yusef drives a Kia

        I started at 5 am after passing out some hours earlier.
        It’s 9:41 here, cheers
        🍻⛈️

      • juris imprudent

        Drinkin’ in the morning sun,
        I’ll be drinkin’ when the evening comes

  43. The Late P Brooks

    Other researchers wonder if the U.S. is prepared to act aggressively at this point in the pandemic, even if the CDC does spot a worrisome new variant.

    “We need to be having a conversation about what it is that we do if a novel variant is detected,” says Sam Scarpino, who’s been monitoring the pandemic at Northeastern University.

    “Right now there doesn’t seem to be much that anyone is prepared to do,” Scarpino says. “We need to have clear guidance around how we will actually go about slowing the spread, how we will protect people who are in high-risk groups, how we’ll work on getting vaccination numbers up, etc.”

    Friedman says the agency is taking steps to possibly monitor wastewater from planes, after conducting a successful pilot project in New York. In the meantime, she says, every bit of information is useful to determine how best to respond if a new variant does emerge.

    I think assaulting CDC employees randomly and setting fire to CDC facilities would qualify as useful feedback.

    Just in case they think lockdowns are going to go as smoothly as last time.

    • Muzzled Woodchipper

      They can fuck off if they expect any sort of widespread compliance. At least until they bring guns to force it.

  44. The Late P Brooks

    I guess this thread isn’t quite dead yet. I wonder if the youtube channel on my roku will serve me up some “engineering explained” links because I watched Sensei’s link.

    I’m not signed in to google/youtube. I try to never be signed in.

  45. Gustave Lytton

    Magic eight ball says article schedule is cloudy.

    • Gender Traitor

      Mercury Gatorade rears its ugly head again!

      • MikeS

        Pisces: Empty card box: Lack of direction, confusion, indecision, apathy

      • Nephilium

        Handles have been jiggled. It should be up shortly.

    • Brochettaward

      We need a rejuvenating First.

      • juris imprudent

        Sure, sure go ahead and crank one out.

      • Brochettaward

        I just did.

      • juris imprudent

        Spent yourself in futility, again.

    • Ted S.

      Lily ate the post.

  46. MikeS

    First!

    • juris imprudent

      Very ironic.