Good morning one and all to another glorious day!
‘Nervous As Hell’: Bewildered Walz Emerges From Media Quarantine Only To Get Shelled By Vance
Israel invades Lebanon and Iran retaliates in major escalation of regional conflict
Biden, Harris gave billions to Iran for peace, but Tehran responded with destabilizing terror
Trump Assassination Attempt Suspect Trial Starting November, Judge Orders
Helene death toll surpasses 160 as search for missing in North Carolina continues
Housing turnover rate hits lowest level in 30 years
120 People to File Sexual Assault Lawsuits Against Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs
That’s all I got for today. I’ll leave you with a song and move along with my day
‘Nervous As Hell’: Bewildered Walz Emerges From Media Quarantine Only To Get Shelled By Vance – nonsense he totally won.
The best headline I’ve seen for Walz this morning is that it was “undecided”, nearly all the other headlines had Vance as a clear winner.
Now if only someone gave a shit about VP candidates.
I remember when Bush’s VP, can’t remember his name right now, was accused of being the puppet master behind that idiot Bush. They nicknamed him the Dark Lord and Darth Vader. He was always referenced as a villain by the media. He was a neo-con and probable war criminal. What was his name again?
https://x.com/jtLOL/status/1841296926630613211?t=Bmnc7CL-SZOic1AEVkuu1g&s=19
Dick Cheney. Just endorsed Harris.
And celebrated by Walz last night
I mean…dude was just twisting the knife into Kamala all on his own.
If Dick Cheney is Darth Vader, I guess Walz is Rugor Nass.
What was his name again?
Dan Quayle.
Israel invades Lebanon and Iran retaliates in major escalation of regional conflict
I feel Israel will need a lot more aid in the near future, so don’t cheap out Americans.
As if I have any say in how much the Israelis take out of my wallet.
Yeah, these interest rates… Not what you meant? :p
What if we expand to include other years – anyone got lines that are worse?
I honestly think this should not really matter, people do get tongue tied. There are a lot more important things in an election than one speech gaffe
I want to point and laugh at evil people.
A man should always have an occupation of some kind. There are far too many idle men as it is.
Poland is free from 1976?
Who am I? Why am I here? got a laugh in the room, but didn’t go over well afterwards…. at all.
Most cogent statements ever made in any American political debate.
Biden – “We finally beat Medicare” is still pretty good.
I would go with that.
From last night…Walz made his way into the top 10 of all time by holding probably 5 of the 10 worst debate lines.
“But my farmers know climate change is real. They’ve seen 500 year droughts, 500 year floods, back to back.”
“What we’ve seen out of the Harris administration now, the Biden Harris administration is”
“You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme court test.”
“Governor, just to follow up on that, the question was, can you explain the discrepancy?”
TW: No. All I said on this was, is, I got there that summer and misspoke on this, so I will just, that’s what I’ve said.”
Moderators played a little game where on two different occasions they referred to Vance’s point/counterpoint as ‘allegations’ and then helped Walz along with what said ‘allegation’ was. On the flip side
“But my farmers know climate change is real. They’ve seen 500 year droughts, 500 year floods, back to back.”
Being right next door to Minnesoda, I’d recommend some fact checking on this. I suppose the flooding claim is true in very localized examples, but certainly nothing widespread. I’m very skeptical of the drought claim.
Well, we did have a drought last year but since records only go back a 150 years or so plus it may not have even the driest drought during that time I’m thinking it’s Walz’s and The Hyperbole.
It’s not even that. It is an inaccurate shorthand for probability that drives some scientists up a wall. In an attempt years ago a hydrologist (if I remember correctly) in an interview about flooding described a similar flood as a 1% possibility. The interviewer looked at him like an iguana contemplating a Rubic’s Cube so the hydrologist tried again with “A flood like this would happen on average once in a century, you know a hundred years.” That is what caught on.
So yes, you could have a “once in a hundred years” event in successive years without climate change explanations.
The media seems to be reporting Vance won, which means it must’ve been beyond humiliating for Walz.
Not beyond but he cannot command the podium that’s for sure.
There were several stills of Walz I expect those in swing states will be seeing in a lot of ads over the next couple of weeks.
As a Minnesodan, I know what an absolute blowhard he is. Yet, I was surprised at how bad he looked up there.
I expected him to lose his cool and get mad if Vance was able to gig him a few times.* I didn’t expect him to look that scared.
Maybe he knew that he wasn’t going to be protected by the Minnesoda Media and might actually be challenged?
* When he started getting really pissed when Vance was needling him about him signing the late term abortion bill is what I expected. Getting red in the face and pissed.
This one.
https://x.com/GuntherEagleman/status/1841416322334195801
the BBC (no relation to the Diddy issue) very reluctantly says Vance “probably” won.
120 People to File Sexual Assault Lawsuits Against Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs
gay.
Then again maybe the religious conservatives were right when they said film and music are dens of sin. It makes sense probably very attractive to idealistic, good looking but not always that bright young people with fame and fortune to be won in case of success.
The casting couch is as old as time.
BTW – LAH Prediction – nobody of any importance is going to go down over this. The worst that will happen is some c-list celeb will get slagged for that time they met a minor at a Diddy party and took them back to their limo/condo/house and date raped them. I have no doubt that many truly powerful people were doing crazy shit at both Diddy parties and Epstein parties. But these people are powerful and this shit will get buried.
Anytime large numbers of people file charges years after the fact, I am immediately skeptical
Get in early before the money is all gone!
Walz’s first major stumble came about forty minutes into the debate when he was asked about a CNN report stating that he had falsely claimed to have been in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre.
“Now look, my community knows who I am. They saw where I was at. I will be the first to tell you, I poured my heart into my community. I’ve tried to do the best I can, but I’ve not been perfect, and I’m a knucklehead at times, but it’s always been about them. Those same people elected me to Congress for 12 years and in Congress, I was one of the most bipartisan people working on things like farm bills that we got done and working on veterans’ benefit,” Walz said, adding that sometimes he gets caught up in the rhetoric.
All of which has fuck-all to do with Tian An Men Square.
“I was born a middle class child….”
He has to keep with the campaign direction and all.
Much folksy. So Coach Dad vibes.
And that was just the latest lie to be revealed. They didn’t even dig into his drunk driving lies, his military record lies, or IVF lies.
Think what a puddle he would be if he ever ended up on the stand and a lawyer could grill him about all that shit.
Wouldn’t even need that. Just think of Hannity or Shapiro was a debate moderator.
Biden, Harris gave billions to Iran for peace, but Tehran responded with destabilizing terror
There really are no good solution in that region. I cannot see any that would not imply literally murdering millions.
I don’t think you’re wrong.
I do think Israel is successful enough to fund its own defense, that I’m perfectly fine with them buying from us — and what they do to protect themselves is not our business and since in my lifetime at least it always seems that they are being attacked (and brutally), I can’t muster up too much sympathy for what happens to their attackers.
Certainly the decapitation of Hamas, the invasion of Lebanon to remove Hezbollah from power and (imho) the breaking of Iran’s ability to project power against Israel [which is what I think needs to happen] by crippling their economy (which unfortunately means higher oil prices because of our dumb ass watermelons here that don’t want domestic production and would rather farm it out to extreme dictatorships that mostly hate us), their conventional forces and continued strikes on the leadership ranks of the “militias” I expect all seem like what needs to happen at this point to me.
Slightly related note: This was an interesting read of a letter to a woman who appears to be spiraling firmly into “nut-case” territory…
Talk like that gets you disinvited from all the DC parties TOS is hosting.
Good think I’ve never been comfortable or enjoyed parties then.
No chance Israel could survive without our largesse.
The other side has many times the population and nearly endless supplies of petrol dollars.
“crippling their economy (which unfortunately means higher oil prices”
You know both won’t work. High enough prices just encouraged enough smuggling anyway. We’d cripple our own economy to deal with something that isn’t even our problem.
“because of our dumb ass watermelons here that don’t want domestic production and would rather farm it out to extreme dictatorships that mostly hate us),”
Well, the watermelons have a lot in common with the extreme dictatorships. I call this feature, not bug.
France, the U.S. and Iran were negotiating a ceasefire last week. Israel clearly didn’t want it.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/lebanese-prime-minister-believes-ceasefire-between-israel-hezbollah-possible-2024-09-26/
I think Israel has had enough of Lucy and her footballs.
Iran is saying the same thing.
Get our troops and Navy and checkbook out of there and let them slug it out.
Yeah, the whole “back off, Israel. Hamas and Hezbollah need time to rebuild and rearm” hasn’t really sold since last October.
Israel clearly didn’t want it.
Because every “cease-fire” in the past has only been used by Iran and it’s proxies to re-arm and re-organize prior to launching new attacks at a later date.
A recent article, I think it was in OMWC’s weekend links, argued that Israel is taking advantage of the U.S.’s missing leadership at the top to conduct operations that would normally be “forbidden.”
…since last October.
Jaysus, it has been a year, hasn’t it? And the United States government is still allowing Americans to be held hostage, without obliterating some people?
Housing turnover rate hits lowest level in 30 years
Does this really matter?
I would think it certainly would to real estate agents and mortgage brokers / banks looking to pocket the interest payments. Hence Fox Business reporting.
It hasn’t stopped housing prices from being absurd in some places. I plan to return home to NH in a few years, and prices up there are still crazy high.
Funneling government money through Blackrock for easy institutional investment eating all the housing stock as well as CCCP folks looking to park their money in something tangible off-shore will do that.
Funneling government money through Blackrock for easy institutional investment eating all the housing stock as well as CCCP folks looking to park their money in something tangible off-shore will do that.
Add in a mass exodus from failing cities and states, and a heaping helping of mass legal and illegal immigration, and it’s no wonder housing costs so much.
Of course that SHOULD imply some falling prices in markets that are being deserted, shouldn’t it?
Of course that SHOULD imply some falling prices in markets that are being deserted, shouldn’t it?
I think the issue is too complicated for that to be guaranteed. Prices may not go down in those places if the supply is being propped up by mass immigration and corporate cash.
supplydemandImmigrants don’t come with money to buy. And the other question is why would corporate cash flow into a falling locale? That’s not any kind of smart investment. So govt money? Yeah, that I could get, except – what funding source? What appropriation?
How can you even ask that? Unless everyone making more than $11 an hour is leveraged 80:1 between their primary residence and flipping houses for a 20% return every 6 months, the entire US economy comes crashing down, since the federal reserve decided the best way to finance Washington’s spending at 150% of GDP in perpetuity is to sop up the excess liquidity from 25 years of effectively 0% interest rates is to shovel it all into the one asset class everybody needs, that’s in relatively fixed supply.
I thought a lot got shoved into college debt as well but I assume just a fraction of housing.
Too many older people are afraid to sell because they feel sure that they could not get a comparable house, or even one downsized to meet empty-nest/retired needs, at a cost they could afford.
That’s us. Also, because property tax limitations are non-transferable, those would go up 4x if we went to a similar house.
Interest rates will have to drop a lot more to change it. People don’t move because they’d be giving up a 2.5% mortgage for a 7% one.
I think this is the major reason for the lockup in the existing homes market.
Yep. Prices need to drop to compensate for higher interest rates. BTW, take a look at historical interest rates. Today’s rates are not bad or out of line with pre-2007 rates. It’s just that we had an extended period of artificially low rates following the Great Recession and the base prices rose accordingly.
source: https://themortgagereports.com/61853/30-year-mortgage-rates-chart#historical
It’s been a long time but I remember double-digit mortgage rates. Thank god we never got accustomed to that as normal.
A 15 year fixed can be had in the mid 4’s today. A 30 year fixed is in the low 5’s.
Its not as bad as it was a year ago, and it’s trending downward.
Who talks about the Pence years?!?
They really should. Pence was a remarkable vice-president. Which other VP can you point to* that actively subverted the administration he was nominally part of?
*since presidents and VPs started running together as part of the same ticket, you historical pedants
John Nance Gardner?
So WSJ, are we supposed to have Israel do this or at this point just have the US directly go to war with Iran?
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/iran-missile-attack-israel-benjamin-netanyahu-hezbollah-biden-lloyd-austin-c33889c5?st=HbghFW&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Too bad we can’t ask the Taliban to use all that equipment on our behalf on the other side of Iran…. (/sarc obviously)
All that equipment is being used to enforce child bride marriages
American ally?
Allies don’t try to sink each other’s ships.
Seems like a Congressional declaration of war would be needed first, no?
We don’t declare war anymore, that’s so 19th century.
Well, we did do so twice in the 20th century, but I guess that was just to be formal about it.
The secret of ‘Blue Zones’ where people reach 100? Fake data, says academic
University College London researcher is on a mission to debunk shoddy research into the world’s oldest people.
Despite being popularised in news articles, cookbooks and even a recent Netflix documentary series, the Blue Zones are really just a by-product of bad data, argues Newman, who has spent years debunking research about extremely elderly populations.
Rather than lifestyle factors such as diet or social connections, he says, the apparent longevity of people in five regions – Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Ikaria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California – can be explained by pension fraud, clerical errors, and a lack of reliable birth and death records.
Dan Buettner, the American author and explorer credited with coining the term Blue Zone, did not respond to a request for comment.
The figures, he found, were simply not believable.
Some of the places reported to have the most centenarians included Kenya, Malawi, and the self-governing territory of Western Sahara, jurisdictions with overall life expectancies of just 64, 65, and 71, respectively.
Similar patterns cropped up in Western countries, with the London borough of Tower Hamlets, one of the most deprived areas in the UK, reported to have more people aged over 105 than anywhere else in the country.
In 2010, the Japanese government announced that 82 percent of its citizens reported to be over 100 had already died.
In 2012, Greece announced that it had discovered that 72 percent of its centenarians claiming pensions – some 9,000 people – were already dead.
Still, the idea of Blue Zones has been hard to shift, even in the face of reliable data.
Japan’s Okinawa prefecture has often been lauded in the media for its diet and cultural practices.
Okinawans, however, have some of the worst health indicators in Japan, according to the Japanese government’s annual National Health and Nutrition Survey, which has been carried out since 1946.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/26/the-secret-of-blue-zones-where-people-reach-100-fake-data-says-academic
I would think California should have good records…
Kemi is right – not all cultures are ‘equal’
The fact that this practical reality really can’t be squared with Enlightenment liberalism and its modern bastard child libertarianism is one of the reasons I tend not to identify so much with the term as the years pass by. And ironically, it’s why “western culture” is unsustainable; it’s suicidally Utopian, and only suitable for the governance of small groups of homogeneous people, just like that competing Utopian ideology it spawned as its mirror opposite.
There is literally no reason that should have been a reply.
So you are saying some cultures fake old age records and other do not?
Pension fraud is a universal cultural value.
“it’s suicidally Utopian”
Only if one takes Western Culture ideals to a suicidal unfettered conclusion. Saying or legislating ‘this far, but no further’ is not a betrayal of ‘Enlightenment’ values; it’s a sensible attitude taken towards the Other, especially hostile Others. Cultures just like living cells need to have boundaries they can survive within. Too much of what is happening today is an attitude that ‘Ebola just wants to live just like us, so we shouldn’t do anything to treat it’.
I think it can be both. The Enlightenment thinkers certainly didn’t shy away from declaring the universality of the ostensible truths they’d elucidated. If humanist secular pluralism can only work in an environment where humanist secular pluralism is already an established cultural value, then in addition to being nothing better than an exercise in self-referential navel gazing, it can only spread itself by revolution, and requires a departure from certain aspects of human nature that are so fundamental as to be nearly universal, making it self-defeating on top of it all.
I think it kinda works as a reply.
I do kind of wonder what you suggest then. And, believe me, I am absolutely open to suggestions.
ES – we start by appreciating the uniqueness, not the universality, of certain values. Which also means we abandon the business of trying to transform everyone else into our image, as opposed to deconstructing our self image into nothingness (the alternative now in vogue).
I more or less agree with JI, but I also suspect we’ll see reversion to the mean culturally and politically. Some industrial version of feudalism in the west, just like when the last continental empire took a shit; ethno-states and a fair bit of genocidal mania for a century or two elsewhere. Everything old is new again.
Rather than lifestyle factors such as diet or social connections
I mean, I get the Blue Zone data was shoddy, but these two factors are important.
Yes, but because we have other real data backing it up. Not necessarily due to the blue zones.
Daily Ray of Sunshine
Very nice.
As an ex-Memphian, St. Jude’s does great things. Maybe even more impressive than Graceland even.
Pope Jimbo:
There are a few charities on my “give without reservation” list. St. Jude’s is one of them.
In local news, the parliament passed a bill to make the third Saturday of every September National Cleanup Day to encourage people to go outdoors and pick up trash.
I wager they’d clean up more if they took the money spent telling people about National Cleanup Day to pay one dude to go around and pick up trash.
It seems the paying 50 bani for each plastic or glass bottle is declared a success. I see homeless / generally poor people every day gathering various bottles.
50 bani as added to every purchase so the government does not pay, but I assume there is some overhead payed via government to the recycling companies. I have no idea if they are actually recycled or what.
50 bani is like 12 cents american
$0.11 is more than most places in the US, even limited to those with a deposit.
Have you considered strapping them to rickshaws?
I don’t know about the Romanian system, but for New York, the deposit paid by the customer at purchase is $0.05. The redemption center will pay $0.05 per bottle returned, and the state will pay the redemption center ~$0.12 per bottle.
Whether the additional $0.07 comes from the general fund or from the unredeemed bottles, I’m not sure. I assume they start with the unredeemed bottles, but end up having to supplement it with other funds.
I’d love for them to set up cigarettes like that. Each cig should have a deposit on it. If you are a cheapskate, you can police your own butts and it won’t cost you a dime.
We all know that the smokers are inveterate litterbugs and will keep flicking those butts everywhere. Initially it will be a bonanza for the homeless as they scour the city picking up butts. Afterwards the city will be pretty clean.
I’ll admit I lose my libertarian street cred when it comes to littering. Can’t stand it.
Nonsense. In the absence of public property, you could purchase all of the commonways and impose the death penalty on littering.
I hated when non-smokers were forced to participate in police call for cigarette butts.
I’m OK with the death penalty for littering no matter who owns it.
I’m OK with the death penalty for littering no matter who owns it.
Yup.
I’ll admit I lose my libertarian street cred when it comes to littering. Can’t stand it.
Are we pro-littering?
:CPA
I’ve still got my amateur status.
“I’m OK with the death penalty for littering no matter who owns it.”
Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m57gzA2JCcM
When my wife and I were drinking beers in the park in Russia we had people lining up to take our empties for the refunds.
Pie preparing for the big day!
You guys think Walz is bad? How about this DFL pol?
I’ll see your Joy and raise you bubbles!
Bubble Boy!
You mean… FLUID LITTERING!?!?ONE!?1
You monster!
Thank you. That was my first thought
If that doesn’t work, maybe the hot cops gang could step in.
Playing Michael Bubble is liable to drive people away, thereby leading to less crime.
If you can get Bubbles out of the trailer park and across the border it might be worth a try.
My biggest regret is that when Walz was talking about all their great policies in Minnesoda, he didn’t bring up the story about his Dept of Ed getting swindled out of $250M. Especially since he lied and lied about his culpability afterwards.
I can GAY-RONE-TEE that she will never pay anything close to that $1.3M in restitution. She’ll claim that she lost it all. And as an ex-convict, she will never be able to make enough money to pay it off.
She’ll probably get out in just a bit over 2 years. If she was smart in hiding her money, she’ll probably get to keep about a million of it. Shit I might do that deal if given the opportunity.
Some of y’all better get crackin’
The American Dream now costs $4.4 million—that’s the estimated lifetime household cost of common milestones, including getting married, raising two children, buying a home, having new cars, saving for retirement, going on yearly vacations, and more.
Anecdotally I will day that sounds about right.
40 years on ~110k/yr.
$110k/yr would be 81st percentile according to this here thing. And if you retired at 65, that’d mean earning at that level from your mid 20s.
On the other hand, perhaps taking the post-war boom when every other industrial nation was living on our handouts as they dug out from the wreckage of a continental war and making it into the aspirational lifestyle in perpetuity is setting people up for needless disappointment. Having a used car that goes faster, uses less gas, and runs for 150,000 miles with an oil change every 7,500; getting married at the courthouse with a few of your close friends and family; living in a house where your kids have to share a bedroom; spending your vacation time at home surrounded by devices that allow you to access every possible form of information and entertainment for less than the inflation adjusted price of a weekly trip to the movies; and working until you’re 70 when you’re going to live 15 years longer on average may not be as severe a deprivation as it’s made out, in historical terms.
Meh. I continue to be shamed when it comes to bonus words, even though I admittedly am targeting accuracy. Ah well.
I played https://squaredle.com/xp 10/02:
*20/20 words (+1 bonus word)
🎯 Perfect accuracy
I played https://squaredle.com 10/02:
*30/30 words (+3 bonus words)
🎯 Perfect accuracy
🔥 Solve streak: 565
I played https://squaredle.com/xp 10/02:
*20/20 words (+6 bonus words)
📖 In the top 2% by bonus words
I played https://squaredle.com 10/02:
*30/30 words (+5 bonus words)
⏱️ In the top 9% by speed
🔥 Solve streak: 655
LOL. 23 y.o. Sierra Sanson tells the Times about Harris: “She’s a badass woman who I want to see succeed.”
Delusion is a powerful drug.
Oy vey. She is looking really hard for that pony hidden under the pile of shit in the stable.
Delicious derrieres and luscious lower-halves on Ass Wednesday.
https://archive.is/HO5DC
“In a televised statement from Downing Street, the prime minister said Tehran had “menaced the Middle East for far too long” and called on the country to “stop these attacks”.”
Maybe if we give them just a few more billion, they’ll start being nice to us!
They’re willing to compromise, they’ll only kill half of (((them))) now. But they’ll want to renegotiate that in a couple of months.
Well the real British tradition would be to let them annex a chunk of a country next door.
“I still don’t think it is cheating because I let my boyfriends use one vagina each”
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/love-sex/i-born-two-vaginas-use-32380876
I have several follow up questions.
Is one of them, “Could I blow on your pussies like a pan flute and play ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb'”?
Because that is my question too.
What about the back door and the sun roof?
DVP or QVP?
QVDA.
Migration, Assimilation, and the Limits of Compassion
Good stuff. We may be fucked.
Collapsing Roman Empire issues.
I think our country is like a frat. As new waves of migrants hit the beaches we hazed the fuck out of them like pledges.
The n00bs would take it and learn the rules. We’d grow to respect them and adopt the best things from their Old Country. Eventually they’d be fully accepted and would get to haze the next wave of migrants.
Now it is like the pledges have decided that they don’t have to put up with any of the hazing. They don’t bother to learn the rituals and secret handshakes. They just demand to be allowed to come to the keggers. And don’t expect them to clean up afterwards.
Change ‘frat’ to ‘literally any sub-cultural group’ and you’re right on the mark. Anything from starting a new job, to moving into a new neighborhood – there are necessary rituals and obligations that come along with the membership in the new group. This was an organic process and it worked well for a long time.
Nowadays, of course, we have several generations of acculturated assholes who demand the benefits of the in-group, without having to go through the sorting process. This is not only unfair, which breeds resentment among those who did go through the sorting, but it also prevents the group from functioning at all; imagine adding a bunch of illiterate out-of-work hilljacks to the tech staff at Oak Ridge nuclear power plant.
This is one of the reasons why I consider people who go on about ‘living their best life’ or ‘being their true authentic selves’ to be little better members of society than the homeless guy on the subway platform jerking his dick…
Except… none of this was ever “well-intentioned”. It was obvious, deliberate self-destruction.
The plebes know it’s bullshit but they’ve been overrules by their betters for decades.
Correct.
The rich knew what they were/are doing and it’s all going according to plan.
Uffda. Just come out and say it. Codify it in law. Fuck, make it an amendment to the Consitution: Taxpayers have no standing! Quit even pretending that people can ever challenge their betters in govt.
The Minnesoda Supreme Court is holding a hearing on a Minneapolis School District contract with the teacher’s union to see if the poor taxpayer has any standing to sue.
“Look peasant, we want this and we’ll get it! Your job is to just hand over your money to us”
Look, if we just go around giving standing to the people financing this shit, they may tire of it and decide not to go along with a bunch of other unconstitutional bullshit we are trying to pull – politicians everywhere.
Honestly, if you can’t fix this with a vote, a lawsuit is no solution.
“Taxpayers would essentially have the ability to re-write collective bargaining agreements through the courts.”
This isn’t going to make people recoil in horror the way they seem to think it will.
Make collective bargaining subject to public voting. Solves all the problems.
Certainly when considering any contract with a public sector union, the contract should be subject to an up-or-down referendum.
Or just bust all pubsec unions. That’d be fine too.
Make collective bargaining subject to public voting.
Side-eyes how often the public votes for bond measures for the teeee-chers – you don’t hate, children… do you?
Not sure that will work out so well either. Maybe the taxpayers can keep their money and spend it to send their crotch-fruit where they want to paying teachers what they consider a fair market price? Yeah, yeah, I know… I’m going to, ah, go, um ‘pet my unicorn’ now too.
PutridMeat:
The locality I live in had a scandal a couple years back (before the great lockdowns) where the school district had “misplaced” a reported $2 million (later stories backed it down to just six figure losses). They still tried to pass levies each election (spring and fall) for years. I think they just were able to barely get one by the voters.
Or just bust all pubsec unions.
Fucking F D R opposed public sector unions. How wrong can you be to allow them?
When we wail about saving democracy, this isn’t what we meant.
How’s that’s deal with the devil known as Obamacare working out?
https://www.wsj.com/business/humana-shares-slide-on-lower-medicare-advantage-ratings-cd6e1267?st=fP8ihD&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/a-cvs-breakup-is-no-easy-fix-for-its-problems-84238623?st=qTmuRb&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Look fat, we beat Medicare.
Where’s Potato? I have to do his Daily Mail links: Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff ‘forcefully slapped ex-girlfriend for flirting with another man’ in booze-fueled assault after date to star-studded gala
Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband assaulted his ex-girlfriend, three friends have told Dailymail.com.
The Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, 59, allegedly struck the woman in the face so hard she spun around, while waiting in a valet line late at night after a May 2012 Cannes Film Festival event in France.
One of her friends told DailyMail.com that the woman called him immediately after the incident, sobbing in her cab, and described the alleged assault.
Is this toxic masculinity?
No, no, no. It isn’t toxic masculinity. It is “redefined masculinity”
You can still be married to an important pol (Dem only!) even if you’ve knocked up a nanny, or pimp slapped a woman for flirting.
HE KNOCKED UP THE NANNY!!!! Why do they keep ignoring that and lifting this douche bag up as some sort of masculine hero? They could just ignore him, but instead they keep writing these glowing stories about how he’s the new definition of “masculine”.
Maybe because with all the low-T “men” in the party they need something, anything even somewhat manly.
Well, just looking at the picture, I’m surprised that there wasn’t talk about the husband being a skinhead. I mean, look at that shirt he’s wearing.
What color were his boot laces?
I need a translation from Limey for this headline.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/dear-deidre/30792703/husband-took-sickie-work-sex-bit-on-side/
I’m guessing the husband called in sick to work so he could spend the day banging his side piece.
Not only CNN, but Reuters too.
So clear the cookie and move on.
https://www.wsj.com/business/media/reuters-cnn-latest-outlets-to-make-you-pay-for-digital-news-bab8c032?st=Puhb5e&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Speaking of peasants….
The Star & Tribune has decided that living on subscriptions to the paper is too limiting. You should just give them money straight up.
They claim this is so they can do better local reporting. After all the shit that they covered up for Walz, maybe they do need better local reporters?
I’d prefer not to.
*ahem* Fuck off
“we need to think of them as civic institutions”
OK.
So, who gets to appoint the board of directors and corporate officers of this civic institution?
Wait… I thought monopolies were BAD?
I’ll also guess that nothing of value was lost.
Translation: We lost the ability to control how you think while you gave us your money pretending we were informing you. Now you can go find that information on your own and its dangerous!
Learn to code assholes.
The fact that they are touting their loss of monopoly power and subsequent, what’s the term, windfall profits as a reason for you to donate to them, as a for-profit company, is a pretty good illustration of how stupid and out of touch they are.
I’ll put in my .02 on the debate. This was another 3 on 1, but Vance was very composed. When he went off topic, he circled back and said “But to answer your question…” And when he wasn’t speaking, he was turned and listening, not making goofy faces like Kamala or scribbling notes. That’s the meme you’re seeing. As Walter Kirn said, he looked Presidential. He owned the room.
Walz looked nervous from the beginning, stumbled over his words, and looked weird.
For a lot of people this was their first impression of Walz and Vance. Vance nailed it. He looked like the guy you want in charge, a nice contrast to Trump’s hyperbolic nature, and that can only help Trump.
LOL from the NYT
So it would appear they conceded who “won” last night, but the import part is how this is bad for Trump.
Sanity check – it is workable to have a break action firearm which uses paper cartridges?
My first thought is the gas seal around the breech wouldn’t be that good.
Some sort of caseless solid charge at the base – even if it encapsulates some regular gunpowder?
Would probably work, but you have to break it open for the next shot, so who cares if brass pops out?
It’s for a setting where they haven’t developed brass cartridges or primers/percussion caps.
primers/percussion caps
So, flintlock?
Paper shotshells (with brass case heads) have been used in break-action shotguns for centuries.
But it would be helpful if you could describe the loading and firing process that you envision.
The closest analogue would be a matchlock-adjacent design where the firing pin is a heated needle on the hammer driven through the paper into the main charge (It’s not technically black powder, so assume it ignites)
I’m worried about the main seal at the break action since puffs from the priming hole are common to that generation of mechanisms.
Not black powder, must be jeweler’s rouge.
Big element of the Arknights game world too (parallel world – with some crossover stories featuring characters from R6: Siege).
Okay, I see. I don’t think that a break action would work well with such a design, unless it was some kind of cammed break action that seated the barrels back into a recessed breechface. That’s not impossible or even that hard mechanically, but it wouldn’t be as simple or as strong as a conventional falling block or interrupted thread design…
OK, no. Breach opening came with cartridge development. Paper charges were pushed down the barrel instead of pouring loose powder.
I know how it happened historically, but this isn’t a historical setting.
Well, what is the advantage to breech loading if there isn’t a cartridge? Presumably your paper ‘cartridge’ includes the projectile, or is the projectile still shoved down from the muzzle?
Nothing is being shoved down the muzzle. Just one combined paper-wrapped package into the breech.
Don’t follow the logic you are trying to create for this ‘innovation’. Not to mention the fouling problem would seem intractable – unless we have magic there too.
I’m not sure where you’re having trouble. It allows for faster loading times, like any other breech loader.
Fouling from the paper case would be an issue too. Also headspacing – I doubt that paper would be strong enough, which would lead to inconsistent ignition and poor accuracy…
With flimsy cartridges? No. Such cartridges would require very gentle handling, so no great speed advantage. And the ignition mechanism only works with a lower pressure explosive (i.e. black powder), which means residue, even worse with partially burned paper.
And if you suggest something like cardboard instead of paper – to overcome some of the issues – the residue problem worsens.
JI – you’re overlooking a very basic thing – a technology need only be an improvement over what came before to be adopted.
Sheldon – the idea is for something in the early smoothbore type of era, so there’s already a limit to the amount of accuracy they’re going to have. One of the scenes I’ve mentally drafted has a character teaching another one how to work it and contains a line to the effect of “make sure there are no embers left from the previous shot, or it might go off when you don’t want it to” and similar shortcomings.
From a storytelling perspective, I don’t want guns to have taken over combat, just added some more flavor to the swords and sorcery already there.
Prussians. Its always Prussians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyse_needle_gun
That design is a bolt action, which has a nice set of locking cams that make sure things are seated snugly and won’t dislodge.
I suppose, but there isn’t any reason that a paper cartridge couldn’t be used in something like a breach-loading Remington rolling block’s locking system. There might be a sealing problem, but that could probably be overcome.
You asked for a sanity check. If it really doesn’t matter – why ask?
I was asking for a sanity check on gas pressures and you began fixating on how its not a perfect implementation of a breech loader.
If your assessment is “more dangerous to the user than whoever it’s pointed at” or “only good for one or two shots”, then say so. “But it doesn’t have these technologies which were explicitly not part of the design description” is a “Yeah, I know.”
The Wim Hof Method?
I don’t recall getting drunk and beating up family in the instructions.
Beware gurus.
That sucks. Me and the Mrs. are fans. Hopefully it’s not true, though it sounds pretty credible.
Yeah, it does. Just like Huberman.
Huberman was not,as I recall, accused of violence
I think knowingly distributing STDs violates the NAP.
was it knowingly?
just accusations as of now, I assume
This is obscene abuse. Most civil servants work loyally and impartially, even for the most obnoxious and ungrateful Ministers, and whether they privately agree with them or not. They also have to cover up for Ministers’ ignorance, and mistakes caused by bad policy not officials.
https://x.com/alexhallhall/status/1841178180935401954
what about the uncivil ones?
Political appointees change with the seasons – let them embarass themselves.
Lotta white hats in there
Sir Humphrey to the white courtesy phone, please.
Scott Adams is cracking me up this morning with his debate observations.
Me too. I always look forward to his debate analysis. He always notices things I never thought about.
“It’s hard to sell Team Joy when you have an upside down mouth.”
Taking down a silo with a sledgehammer
Reason number twenty gazillion why women outlive dudes.
Whoops!
Bomb dropped by U.S. in World War II explodes at airport in Japan, causing runway damage and cancellation of 80 flights
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-wwii-bomb-explodes-japan-airport-runway-flights-canceled/
In our defense, it was wartime. Quality control is a bit rushed.
Also in our defense, what kind of absolute retard builds a runway on top of unexploded ordinance. It might be worth checking…
Depending on timing, that might have been us too.
For a lot of people this was their first impression of Walz and Vance. Vance nailed it. He looked like the guy you want in charge, a nice contrast to Trump’s hyperbolic nature, and that can only help Trump.
And if somebody manages to get a round on Trump…
I have decided this is why the Machine is so terrified of Vance.
I think they need to extra carefully fortify these elections, just in case.
Walz: It’s just the GUNZ.
They mostly come out at night. Mostly.
The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books
To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/
Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
Read: Why kids aren’t falling in love with reading
“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.
TO be fair: a whole book? ain’t nobody got the attention span for that
I was reading chapter books either before I started school or shortly after.
I loved to read until the schools began assigning garbage that was pure torture to work through.
I can’t find the article anymore, but they can’t do math either. Columbia’s remedial math department is booming.
I’ve seen this talked about a couple times, and I find it very hard to believe. My daughter mows down a book every 2 days. In middle school.
English, our mixed Mother Tongue
If it wasn’t for the French, we’d all be speaking German
https://www.edwest.co.uk/p/english-our-mixed-mother-tongue
Around the year 1190, a chronicler in Christ Church, Canterbury put pen to paper to transcribe the Gospels, a piece of writing which — unbeknown to him — would be the last written record of his language: Old English.
Such was the transformation of the vernacular over just a short space of time that, 40 years later, it was recorded that a monk was trying to learn Old English, and towards the end of the 13th century another chronicler added the phrase ‘unknown language’ to some Anglo-Saxon text. To speakers of what was now Middle English, the old language was incomprehensible.
England’s first printer, William Caxton, would later remark of a piece of Old English that ‘certaynly it was wreton in suchewyse that it was more lyke to Dutche than Englysshe: I coude not reduce ne brynge it to be understonden.’
The Norman Conquest dramatically changed our language, bringing an influx of loan words as English was replaced by French and Latin as the medium of government and law for three centuries.
Today only a quarter of English vocabulary is Germanic in origin, with over half coming from French or Latin, although the vast majority of the most common words are Anglo-Saxon. Perhaps, with the Conquest, English might have gone extinct altogether, just like several previous native languages of Britain, such as Cumbric, which lived on only in sheep-counting.
Almost all of the most common 100 English words are Anglo-Saxon, with the exception of a handful of Norse terms and the neologism ‘okay’; by one measure, the most popular French word is just, ranked at 105.
You can exchange cows for peas with a Frisian man if you speak Old English.
I’m thankful English dropped most grammatical gender and inflection.
Gendered nouns are dumb. As near as I can tell English’s lack of gendered nouns is unusual in the Indo-European language family.
Why does the table need to be a boy or girl, German man!?
There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
Never trust the French.
¡Sí!
Cleetus has a video up about flying his new helicopter around North Carolina delivering stuff and moving people. You can watch it if you want.
What I took away from it, looking over his shoulder at the incredible damage and washouts in the background, is the planet doesn’t give the slightest fuck about people or what they do, or what they build, or what puny gases they might expel.
Nobody mentioned innovative nukular power last night. That was a whiff on Vance’s part.
Vance mentioned nuclear during the climate change conversation.
“Nervous as Hell”. Was Walz as nervous as a cat on a Haitian roof?
“Donald Trump promised Tuesday to turn his return to the site of his attempted assassination into a celebration of the life of firefighter Corey Comperatore, who died after being struck by the gunman’s bullet.
Trump will appear before supporters in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday.
‘It’s going to be a really big event, and it’s going to be something,’ Trump told reporters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. ‘We’ll celebrate the life of Corey.'”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13912905/donald-trump-corey-comperatore-butler-rally.html
But why?
As a giant FU to the FBI operatives who tried to have him offed?
His campaign has done practically nothing with that iconic photo, which puzzles me. This might serve to get a number of themes back on the table, even if not explicitly mentioned.
It’s certainly motivating for his base.
Facebook temporarily banned that photo, and Google buried it in search results.
That iconic photo is being actively suppressed on social media.
There are other outlets besides social media.
Admittedly, Google is its own problem, though.
If you wave your hands much harder, you might fly away
The self-assured and smooth Vance, by contrast, may have won the debate on points, although his constant addressing the female moderators, Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, by their first names grated on more than a few women’s nerves. (“I need JD Vance to stop saying ‘Margaret’ in that creepy way,” posted the writer Sophie Vershbow on X.)
He seemed eager to come off as a nice guy, fast-talking about his humble Appalachian roots, all while showing off his Ivy League polish. Leaning hard into the Hillbilly Elegy persona – and away from his crazy talk about the misery of childless cat ladies and the need to monitor menstrual cycles – he probably helped his own chances to be president someday.
But none of that should matter one iota in the presidential election that is only five weeks away. It’s far from the heart of what matters: that Trump has proved himself a danger to America and to the world, thoroughly unfit to be elected president again.
How dare that misogynist creep act as if he is the equal of those moderators?
What was the point of even having that debate, when we all know Trump is a minion of Satan, sent here to prepare the ground for His unholy terrors.
How did Walz address the moderatresses?
Walz wasn’t given permission to make eye contact with her, let alone address her!
He called women by their actual names? What happened to “toots” and “honey”?
“his constant addressing the female moderators, Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, by their first names”
I thought it was standard practice in interviews and the like to refer to the interviewer, and generally the interviewee, by their first names. She would likely be complaining if he referred to them as Ms. O’Donnell and Ms. Brennan, as well. “Why is he constantly pointing out that they’re women referring to them as ‘Ms.’” or somesuch.
“COVID-19 created chaos on Earth, but a new study has suggested that the impact of this global pandemic extended far beyond our planet.
Researchers discovered that the surface of the moon may have been indirectly impacted by global lockdown.
The team found that nighttime temperatures on the lunar surface dropped significantly during the strict COVID-19 lockdown period from April to May 2020…
The researchers hypothesize that this cooldown was caused by a sudden drop in radiation being emitted from Earth as human activity ground to a halt during lockdown, which in turn reduced the amount of heat escaping the atmosphere.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13912885/Scientists-reveal-COVID-pandemic-changed-moon.html
SCIENCE!!!!!
Excuse me for a few minutes, I need to slam my head against a brick wall.
[*minutes later*]
Ah, that’s better.
So *that’s* the loud, hollow sound I hear.
See these are good because Walz was all in on believing the experts. Ladies and Gentlemen…said ‘experts’.
And here I recall the reduction in driving and even electrical generation during the pandemic was touted as the way forward for “solving” climate “change”.
Vance tried to portray Trump as urging only peaceful demonstrations when in fact the then president incited the riot at the Capitol.
Now Walz was ready to pounce.
“Mike Pence made the right decision,” Walz said, making the obvious point about the former vice-president who refused to do Trump’s bidding that day. “This was a threat to our democracy in a way we had not seen.”
Walz added a glaring truth: “And that’s why Pence is not on this stage.”
Ooh, zing. Devastating.
Thanks for reinforcing the decision to dump pence
“In Fact”
Where has anyone who investigated said that? He was cleared of charges, correct? Am I smoking crack?
Sorry the fact checking moderators decided in the second half to no longer fact check because it was against the rules (rules were candidates could ‘fact’ check each other). I get Vance wanted the conversation to move along, but he could have pushed back on that one.
“And that’s why Pence is not on this stage.” Because the rioters killed him?
A day in the life of Minneapolis.
So depressing.
Circumstances beyond our control
Fat Bear Week, a celebration of brown bears’ survival instincts, brought a grisly reminder of the animals’ predatory nature on Monday, when a male bear, 469, killed a female, 402, at Katmai National Park & Preserve in Alaska.
The unsettling scene was captured by a popular live webcam that follows the bears on the Brooks River.
——-
As stunned viewers watched online, the two bears engaged in a lengthy and violent fight in deep water at the river’s mouth — a clash that eventually ended with one bear dying, and the other dragging her body ashore.
Who’s cuddly now, motherfucker?
BEAR PATRIARCHY!!!
“Bitch didn’t have my honey.”
Of course they do. Why would you want to have a vehicle that (sometimes) actually has to do real work have relatively low replacement cost replacement parts?
https://www.thedrive.com/news/thieves-keep-stealing-ford-super-duty-taillights-so-now-theres-an-anti-theft-kit
Vance mentioned nuclear during the climate change conversation.
I guess I missed it.
Why would you want to have a vehicle that (sometimes) actually has to do real work have relatively low replacement cost replacement parts?
But those guys at the lumber yard are always so careful.
Or the guys that work for your businesses. Because everybody is always so careful with the company truck.
Tail light guards by Otter Box. Or Glibtech, get in on the ground floor for some of that truck nuts money being wasted.
I can’t make the math ever work on these music deals. This one makes more sense than some others.
Pink Floyd Sells Music Rights to Sony for $400 Million
https://variety.com/2024/music/news/pink-floyd-sells-music-rights-to-sony-400-million-1236165925/
Get ready for Cialis commercials featuring Pink Floyd’s music.
Comfortably Numb?
Not Now John?
You know it’s coming. Jardiance commercials too.
I live almost on the border of upstate SC and western NC. I’ve seen civilian helicopters flying back and forth but no military activity at all.
I thought I’d see troops and equipment from Fort Jackson going by to NC. Heard the 82nd and 2nd Marine Division haven’t been sent in either.
Biden-Harris really don’t give a shit that a bunch of rednecks on a purple state got flooded out.
Seems little different than I recall in NJ.
Yes – does have a different feel. Surprised me I’m not seeing more of a response beyond linemen restoring power.
you would think this is a great opportunity to make a completely empty gesture at least with a visit and photo op. I guess that would push her and the brain dead one in charge to actually do something faster than a speeding turtle (FEMA). I would expect them to at least get out of the way and allow private enterprise to help.
@Drake
FedGov slow walking? Get out!
No they don’t. This is another nail in the coffin for some voters. Which is good. God help us if Kamala gets in for four years.
Without the Western third of NC, it’s a blue state. Maybe they hope these people aren’t able to vote in a month.
Yall gonna be nearly cleaned up when the FEMA vans roll in to proclaim victory
As odious as the “George Bush doesn’t like black people.” thing was. I don’t think the Trump campaign leaning into the federal response (or lack thereof) would be bad.
Goose, gander, etc.
Weird timing
https://www.tn.gov/military/news/2024/9/26/tennessee-national-guard-task-force-deploying-to-middle-east.html
Concur. Especially since there are a lot of federal/military assets in the area that don’t seem to have been mobilized at all. I read they are even denying soldiers who live in the impacted towns leave to go home and check on things and help out.
I live almost on the border of upstate SC and western NC. I’ve seen civilian helicopters flying back and forth but no military activity at all.
The other thing which jumped out at me from that Cleetus thing is how densely forested that country is. There aren’t a ton of places where a big helicopter can can land.
Oh come on…we built a floating pier in the Med, we can land a helo in some trees surely! Just as fucking effective.
The Army method for clearing landing sites in a hurry probably wouldn’t go over well in CONUS…
OK, you saw the debate, or at least some clips. You saw immediate coverage…
Now see the spin. Check out this thread
https://x.com/nathantmorton/status/1841342581608751320?s=19
CNN debate polling has a history of oversampling Republicans by a big margin, so that really should be Walz winning 60-40
Except I posted the numbers of that poll last night and it was oversampled of Dems…whoopsie
I have to say, I just love Tim Walz’s face! He is so expressive and so open that you can’t help believing him. I think we’ll get the truth from this guy always, even if he is a “knucklehead” at times. Great job, @Tim_Walz! Can’t wait to vote #HarrisWalz2024
Poll shows Walz as a close winner…… first reply
It was definitely not that close! Come on. Walz won that fucking debate! Jesus Christ.
He won because he ‘held his own’ and its a baked in win no matter what to nearly 50% of the country anyway.
JD Vance was kinda the man.
It’s very refreshing to have a right winger who can actually articulate a single thing.
we built a floating pier in the Med, we can land a helo in some trees surely! Just as fucking effective.
Send in the Seabees to clear and flatten some mountain tops!
I suspect an advance team could mobilize enough locals with chains saws to clear landing zones pretty quickly.
He has really found his stride
“Motherfucker, I am an American…that shit doesn’t work on us” – Matt Taibbi
So great
I read they are even denying soldiers who live in the impacted towns leave to go home and check on things and help out.
They’re desperately needed in places like Lebanon, and Germany.
Don’t believe me? Believe NBC
All propaganda, all the time
https://x.com/mattmfm/status/1841320867260780721?s=19
Who “won” the debate matters very little. Dr. Oz killed Fetterman in their debate. Guess who won the election?
Matt Taibbi saying the loud part out loud.
He has completely become one of us
https://x.com/MikeNayna/status/1840560681747185827?s=19
“Motherfucker, I’m an American. That shit doesn’t work on us!”