Sunday again, and I’m tasked with picking up the dog shit from the back yard. And somehow, there’s symbolism in that. But before I go outside and deal with the blazing heat and smelly Volkswagen-sized turds, I’ll lay out a few links for your delectation.
But first, the birthdays. Starting with a guy whose bottom was trimmed- and his top, too; a guy whose rules we all obey; a dishonest statist piece of shit who swore he could pass through the eye of a needle; the Queen of Hype who had to school a lot of over-educated idiots about the Monty Hall Problem; a guy who was the apple of his mother’s eye; and a guy who managed to be fatter than Luis Tiant.
And now the news.
Stupid Uncle Joe praises the Schenck decision. Fuck you, Joe, I hope you get an aneurysm and die before destroying even more lives.
Yang is a pussy. Or completely cynical. Or both.
They took his head out of the freezer for this???
Nutty self-absorbed chick is nutty and self-absorbed.
Scroll down to see the tax increases they have planned for you to keep the pyramid scheme going.
He really, really needs to be on the Browns, but the Raiders are a good second choice.
We can hardly wait. But at least it will be better than Jaws.
Modern academia, Baltimore-style.
Old Guy Music combines my John Prine kick with my adoration of Iris DeMent. You can skip ahead to 1:30 if you want to bypass the patter. Delightful and hilarious song, and really, one day SP and I are going to have to play this for friends.
Hopkins spokesperson Karen Lancaster in a statement, “the safety, security, and protection of our students and others are of paramount importance to the University. “[based on the] undisputed facts of the case, the University took interim and now permanent action to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the community.”
She cribbed that from Lord of the Flies.
Garland Hall is a the old administration building that is now occupied by an outgrowth of the Electrical and Computer Engineering departments. The language processing and recognition efforts started when I was there a long, long time ago.
The losers were protesting an armed campus police force in one of the most violent cities in America because “racism and capitalism”. But the grievance studies twats don’t dare stray far from campus for fear of getting mugged, raped, or otherwise violated.
Povey just wanted to get some work done that adds value to human existence.
Hopkins did ultimately have the police break the sit-in up with predictable results:
Holy Gods, what a bunch of fucking gibberish. You can’t even respond that that.
Historically police abuse every-bodies.
More likely he/she/xe cares because it gets attention.
Mornin’
And as someone that’s had a Pyrenees, you have my empathy & sympathy.
She kept SP up much of the night barking at coyotes. It’s astonishing, but she likes to bark. The dog, not SP.
Her favorite bark-targets: Gojira and bacon magic.
I’m pretty sure some dogs (cough, cough *my avatar* cough) are barking at air molecules that are not moving in the proper direction.
Pyrs have a habit called “recreational barking.” Not a joke.
Since they were bred to be guard dogs, and watch over sheep, it makes sense.
Mine would do that (bark at nothing visible), and I called it pre-emptive barking
The wife sits dogs (via Rover), and a regular is a Pyr – another one barking at random air molecules.
When we first got Emma Lou, we thought she didn’t bark, and only bayed. So it turned out she was just being polite for a few weeks, and then the mask came off, and we got to hear the barking. She’s not too bad, she calms down after a bit.
The other night both LH and I were awakened by a huge “thud” on the side of the house. But since doggy woo made no noises about it, I figured it had to be non-human.
The other night both LH and I were awakened by a huge “thud” on the side of the house. But since doggy woo made no noises about it, I figured it had to be non-human.
STEVE SMITH.
lol, SteVE always goes beyond making MeRE NOisES!
I have a recreational barker. *sigh*
Half Australian Sheppard, half Labrador. Sweetest, most personable dog that ever lived. She was literally born into my hands and bonded with humans like a goose hatchling, but God the barking gets on my nerves.
Sleepy Joe is more than just sleepy at this point
“Coma Joe” has a nice ring to it.
We can hardly wait. But at least it will be better than Jaws.
Maybe maybe not. I am not sure I want to watch anything from those two. We already have enough woke in the world.
Uncle Joe’s Dementia, the gift that keeps on giving. It’s really starting to look like a red wave might actually be a thing.
Am I the only one who noticed that in his quote the other day about watering the tree of liberty he mentioned “the blood of patriots” but said nothing about that of tyrants. Way to Freudian slip there Joe.
You’re just not as smart as the white kids.
Still leading Trump by 10%
Hillary has a 97% chance of winning the election according to polls.
Ninety. Seven. Percent. yep.
I still think they should just be honest and say “Anyone 50 and up, things stay the way they are. Under 50? Social Security is going away, invest in your retirement and we’ll have to up taxes to pay for those already on it.” It would suck, but everyone knows that’s effectively what has to happen anyway and they might as well just be up front about it.
And good morning, glibs.
Muh soshul contract!!! /terribly-average-American-conserving-a-progressive-program
That binding contract that none of us ever signed.
And whose terms keep changing. Locke would probably be horrified at some of the things that are claimed to be part of it these days.
I will happily let FedGov keep every penny I’ve paid into the SS system if they let me out of it immediately.
This was a discussion 25 years ago.
Back then there were articles done because one city opted out of social security and their retirees were coming into their retirement. The comparisons were apt because they kept the same contribution level as Social Security. (actually less, because they didn’t adopt the “trust fund” increase) They had more than double the income of Social security. I forget the exact numbers, but the big headline was that when they retired, workers retirement checks were bigger than their paychecks when they were working. The magic of compounding returns.
ah… Here’s a more recent article from Forbes. Apparently it is still working well.
New factoid provided by Forbes: the private plans provide a death benefit (life insurance) that is more than 850 times as big as the Social Security death benefit. Also, you get to keep your retirement account if you die, unlike Social Security – well, your estate does, anyway.
So if everyone had gone down that road, we’d all be much, much wealthier. We would still need a social safety net for the indigent, but it would be tiny compared to social security.
Imagine what the payout would be today if people hadn’t laughed at Goldwater 55 years ago?
Scroll down to see the tax increases they have planned for you to keep the pyramid scheme going.
For all they talk about raising the minimum wage, they sure like to tax the fuck out of people at the bottom of the wage scale. And keep them addicted to government and prevent them from becoming self-sufficient.
So kick government-sector workers out of defined-benefit plans the way you can’t get such pensions from private employers any more. What an Orwellian-named piece of legislation.
In short: Fuck you, cut spending.
“And keep them addicted to government and prevent them from becoming self-sufficient.”
^This guy gets it.
What about that trust fund we kept hearing so much about?
I come to this website for my daily dose of wholesome social and political commentary and I’m greeted with an image of a used feminine hygiene product. What has this world come to when even a fine, family friendly place like glibertarians.com has descended into base vulgarity?
https://www.ebay.com/itm/FRANKIES-TIKI-ROOM-Las-Vegas-Rare-Original-BEARDED-CLAM-Mug-1st-Ed-Dirk-Vermin/183897041298?redirect=mobile
Probably not the right mug for you.
Ninety bucks? That is offensive.
Here ya go. I think I got all the bugs out of it.
Neat, I’m way too hung over to attempt a crossword now but I’ll have a go when the Aleve kicks in.
I was hoping 10-across was ‘cat food’
You’re damn close.
Here’s the answer key for you lazy people out there.
https://ibb.co/ZBR4Yg6
Thanks for putting together straff! Did better than I thought and enjoyed the hell out of it. Better than the NYT or any paper’s one
Got way too many words in it. Oh, wait, I’ll just use the answer key. Hey, that works, I’ll be finished by noon.
Good luck!
“Contrary to what many may think, the Freetown of Christiania did not come into existence as an expression of a free society, but rather was a rebellion against an authoritarian bureaucracy,” Smidl observes.
“When progressive democratic politicians in the US refer to the Scandinavian welfare states as a source of inspiration, they do not see its flip side: the total control of and emasculation of every living soul,” notes Smidl.
I think Kamala Harris, in her heart of hearts, would disagree. That’s exactly what she wants.
I’ve been to Christiana about 15 years ago. A young colleague went recently at my suggestion. It’s apparently been taken over by gangs.
Harris is a complete authoritarian as long as there is a chance she will be in control or can grift off it.
Maybe Mueller should investigate the Epstein suicide? Just sayin.
Hey, get with the times. Homicide can now identify as suicide.
What has this world come to when even a fine, family friendly place like glibertarians.com has descended into base vulgarity?
All your base vulgarity are belong to us.
“Netflix staffers describe the surreal experience of an office visit from the president, who reportedly enters the building via an underground tunnel connected to the parking garage,” the Hollywood Reporter said.
It’s really a freight elevator from Hell.
Pet peeve: he’s not the president. He used to be the president. He’s not the president now and thank god won’t be again.
You’re right. He won’t be…
/Wookie Obama
huh, I would have thought the desert heat would immediately transform them into hobo-stove fuel.
John Prine’s the man, nice simple songs with lyrics that actually mean something. It’s too bad his voice is shot now but maybe he could consider an autotune album.
Perish the thought!
Prine is awesome, and I’m surprised he hasn’t been the Old Guy Music pick before…or I missed it.
Prime Prine
He was two days ago.
NO AUTOTUNE.
All the good stuff happens when I’m on vacation!
Pet peeve: he’s not the president. He used to be the president.
But- he represents a better, kinder, gentler America, when racialism had been put aside, and we all lived in harmony. Not this shithole we call Trump’s America. He’ll always be their presidente.
It’s apparently been taken over by gangs.
Gangs? In Denmark? Do they rape and pillage? Invade England?
I was told there are a lot of tatted up East European dudes that told them to keep moving near some bars.
I was there in 2010 with a crew of folks. It was fun, quaint, even. Pusher Alley or Row or whatever was there, and fine, but it was right on the edge of being dangerous. It had this vibe like we were left alone because of our numbers, although it was a close call because we only had 4-5 dudes and about 6-8 women. Even then they were talking that it couldn’t/wouldn’t last. The government had begun sending in the cops on the reg for ‘tourist safety’ according to the squatters and it didn’t feel like they were going to let that prime piece of real estate lie.
Modern academia, Baltimore-style.
I think a better alternative to breaking into a building that idiot students have occupied it to shut the power to the building and enact a blockade around it. Only let people leave. They’ll run out of food eventually.
+1 Donner Party
Which public servants, Kevin? Maybe… federal employees? God forbid anyone with a defined-benefit pension paid for by taxes be means-tested for SS benefits.
In Ohio, state employees don’t even pay into Social Security, they pay into OPERS (Ohio Public Employee Retirement System). Then they retire after 20 years, start drawing benefits, and go back to work at the same job they just “retired” from.
Since about 1984, any new federal employee has as part of their retirement plan SS.
“go back to work at the same job” as a consultant
Some have found themselves in a spontaneous conversation with Obama about a project, while others are delighted when he remembers their name from a previous meeting.
SQUEEEEE!
“May I kiss the hem of your robe, Your Holiness?”
barf
It’s absolutely pathetic.
Equal Treatment of Public Servants Act
We can start with the police.
Trump’s America- what a shithole
Republicans have been way too lax and accepting of this kind of rhetoric.
A USA Today study reveals that Trump has used words like “invasion,” “killers,” “criminals,” “aliens,” “predators” and “animal” more than 500 times at rallies attended by tens of thousands of people since his election.
These words have consequences, especially in a country where there are more gun shops than grocery stores, more guns than people, and where, in states like Texas, it is easier to get a gun than it is to register to vote.
Yeah, whatever. Take your meds.
So basically every 80’s action flick is racist.
I’d like to see an individual count on each of those as they certainly carry different connotations and meanings. Some context would be nice too.
Is he talking about MS-13 and the like when he uses the criminals, killers, predators, and animal pejoratives? If yes, and the answer is yes from what I’ve seen, he’s being too lenient.
The editorial decisions are just outrageous across most publications anymore. take this one for example from today’s Epstein article in the NYT:
If someone implies an equivalence between the Trump-Epstein and the Clinton-Epstein relationships their opinions and musings on the matter can be safely discarded.
Oh, it is better than that….
they have all conveniently memory-holed the stories about Clinton flying on the Lolita Express. That entire thing has been tamped down, and now the themes are Mara Lago and Trump at a party. The top-line propagandists are all in a twist about this because they are convinced that Esptein was gonna give the goods on Trump, and they suspect that Trump had him killed off.
Cognitive biases are really, really impressive. And quite scary.
If Epstein, who gave millions to Democrats and to liberal causes, had dirt on Trump…..why wouldn’t he have released it in October 2016 and absolutely ensured the ascension of The Most Qualified Candidate Ever?
Like let’s say all the proggy fever dreams are true, that Trump is the Trump from The Hat and the Hair and Epstein has video of him in living color…..why wouldn’t that have been released before the election?
I hear it’s really hard to buy a book in Texas too,
“Like LITERALLY more gun shops than grocery stores!”
Don’t I wish
You must live in a gun desert.
“Republicans have been way too lax and accepting of this kind of rhetoric.”
If we’re going to play this game let’s look at what effect calling everyone not on board with open boarders a racist has done.
“These words have consequences, especially in a country where there are more gun shops than grocery stores, more guns than people, and where, in states like Texas, it is easier to get a gun than it is to register to vote.”
If you make shit up and tell outright lies your credibility is shit. That’s how that works. You don’t get to show outrage when people call you’Fake news’.
Trump: Conspiracy Theorist
Meanwhile, the press continues to hammer on the almost non-existent Trump-Epstein connection.
That’s pretty bold from the same news group that just days ago was linking Trump to white supremacy through half staff flags on 8/8.
“The reason multi-employer pension plans are under pressure is mostly driven by economic forces such as the contraction of certain industries like steel or transportation, not bad actors who took unnecessary risks, Johnson said.”
Translation: I took reasonable risks and still lost so I should be bailed out.
If the current pension is under water in this market, they’re doing it wrong. Just wait till the inevitable correction comes.
I guess if you can invent a penaltax to save a bill, then there’s also a right to the bathroom of your choice in the Constitution.
https://www.dailypress.com/news/dp-nws-gloucester-transgender-teen-20190809-story.html
But no right is absolute…
I like that it’s the ‘board’s policy’ that created the stigma… not, like, the person’s choice… We truly are living in bizarro world now.
Does anyone else get creeped out when government officials say you don’t need guns because the government will crush you anyway?
Does that qualify as an implicit or explicit threat?
I once did but, to be honest, the idea is just so historically inaccurate as to just elicit a head shake and a “Bless your heart.“
It’s not so much the argument as the open acknowledgement that they will ride over your corpse with tanks to maintain their power over you.
They certainly would, good luck getting the military to do that though. Even if the generals went along with it the rank and file would rebel.
I may be totally remembering things incorrectly but I seem to recall a survey taken of USMC NCO/enlisted ranks back in the mid 1990s that asked about willingness to engage in firearms confiscation from civilians and a fairly strong majority would happily do so if ordered.
They didn’t sign up because they didn’t like taking orders.
“The sergeant said…”
That’s the kind of question you don’t give your real answer to if you disagreed. Also, it wouldn’t be under peaceful times like the 90’s or even now. Ask that again during civil strife and you’d probably get a much lower number. At least I hope.
Like I said in a string yesterday, I trust soldiers a lot more than I trust cops.
Not that I don’t believe you but I’d have to see that survey and how the items were presented. Was it a survey that asked about weapons confiscation during, for instance, a natural disaster in a specific area or did it refer to a general confiscation? The former I think they would, the latter not so much.
I could be completely misremembering this. I recall that
Birch BarlowRush Limbaugh was on a tear about the survey results for a spell.Yeah, I would like to see that survey because in my 2+ decades, I was consistently (and pleasantly) surprised at how many Marines were well-versed in posse comitatus and the underlying rationale behind it. I had a friend from basic school I bumped into years later and he was telling me about how his infantry platoon had been ordered up to LA for the riots. He said he told them not to load their weapons and to stay back away from it all. When I asked him about that he said, “I got kids in my platoon from those neighborhoods. What am I gonna do, order them to shoot their f*&^ing neighbors?!” Then he told me it was an illegal order under posse comitatus – this was before I was a lawyer and was my first introduction to that law.
I saw that played out in various contexts and discussions over the next 20+ years.
About the one saving grace of the military is the acculturation to the Constitution, since it is the document they swear allegiance to. If that culture ever fails, however, yeah, that would be bad.
About 20% of the population would squeal with Glee watching that happen.
And they should be the ones sent to do the collecting.
It is creepy and, barring the use of nukes, it’s also wrong.
The Nukes is a whole other layer of hypocrisy. I bet you Swalwell has no problem calling Tulsi an Assad apologist when the whole problem with Assad is that he used WMD on his own people.
The idea that they would crush me if I did not disarm is jarring. But the idea that they expect me to disarm and accept whatever fate they decide for me without limit is insulting.
Yes.
Seeing as Mueller was fishing, wouldn’t he have found anything regarding Trump and Epstein?
Unless of course Epstein was off limits…
On Friday, Wright Allen sided with Grimm and the ACLU of Virginia on the case.
She ruled the board’s policy violates both the U.S. Constitution and federal law. “The perpetuation of harm to a child stemming from unconstitutional conduct cannot be allowed to stand,” she wrote.
What the fuck does that even mean?
It means you have the Constitutional right to determine what bathroom you want to use today.
Don’t you feel empowered in the Land of the Free?
Follow-up to HIV Woman: Don’t Stick It In Cray-Cray
Twist on the old discussion. What if she thought she did? Is that at least civilly liable?
Is it attempted murder if you pointed the gun and pulled the trigger, mistakenly believing the gun to be loaded?
Pre-meditated attempted murder
+1 mirror with the message – “Welcome to the world of AIDS!”
I may be totally remembering things incorrectly but I seem to recall a survey taken of USMC NCO/enlisted ranks back in the mid 1990s that asked about willingness to engage in firearms confiscation from civilians and a fairly strong majority would happily do so if ordered.
Nuremberg? That’s some race track in Germany, right?
“Miley Cyrus kisses Brody Jenner’s ex Kaitlynn Carter as she announces SPLIT from husband Liam Hemsworth after just seven months of marriage”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-7345275/Miley-Cyrus-shares-steamy-smooch-Brody-Jenners-ex-Kaitlynn-Carter-girls-holiday-Italy.html
“Where it all went wrong: The signs that showed Liam Hemsworth and Miley Cyrus were heading for a split after less than one year of marriage”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-7345497/Where-went-wrong-signs-showed-Liam-Hemsworth-Miley-Cyrus-marriage-rocks.html
“Miley Cyrus appears sans wedding ring in vacation photos posted just HOURS before news of her split from Liam Hemsworth”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-7345535/Miley-Cyrus-appears-sans-wedding-ring-photos-posted-news-split-Liam-Hemsworth.html
“Is this the REAL reason they split? Claims Miley Cyrus and husband Liam Hemsworth ‘broke up a year ago after explosive fight over baby plans’… but got back together”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-7345901/Did-Miley-Cyrus-Liam-Hemsworth-split-baby-plans.html
It looks like Miley isn’t ready for a baby. Good move Miley, don’t unleash your progeny on us.
Uh, probably way down the list.
From last night’s discussion, she said they were working through things because her identification as Queer is the most important part of her identity. This makes heterosexual monogamous relationships challenging for her..
Some chicks are just not worth the trouble.
But according to the DailyMail some are worth four articles in a row.
“Where it all went wrong”…. ehm Miley Cyrus
Takes one to know one
Senator Bernie Sanders carved out a fragment of time Saturday afternoon to call the president “an idiot.”
“Donald Trump believes climate change is a hoax,” Sanders wrote. “Donald Trump is an idiot.”
——
Last fall, the president said climate change scientists had a political agenda they were following, according to a BBC report.
Earlier this year, the president said the United States is rather clean, and that it’s other countries that need to clean up their act.
“Right now we’re at the cleanest we’ve ever been and that’s very important to me,” Trump said. “But if we’re clean, but every other place on Earth is dirty, that’s not so good. … So I want clean air, I want clean water, very important.”
The tweet seemed to come out of nowhere on Saturday from Sanders, who remains among the top four Democratic contenders in every major 2020 poll. Former Vice President Joe Biden leads all recent polls, according to RealClearPolitics.com.
Totally outlandish things to say. The man is a monster.
“Out of nowhere” you say.
“Hey, look at me! I’m still in this thing! Pay attention.”
Has Trump gotten them to turn against clean air and water now? The man’s a damn genius.
Just imagine if…
Well, we don’t have to imagine. The press goes full “Trump is Hitler” mode every time he says someone else is wrong, let alone were he to call them an idiot.
And in Bernie’s defense, I’ve called Trump an idiot plenty of times. Just don’t reserve your outrage for one political or racial direction. If one can’t call Harris a vicious, amoral, statist would-be dictator, or Booker a moron in a suit, or Warren an addle-brained communist……
so my next cultural question in the series do Americans eat:
Green walnuts. By this I mean after the nutmeat has formed but before the green husk has dried on the nut. the husk is removed – with gloves usually otherwise t will stain your hands – and the nut inside is pale yellow and has a membrane that you can remove, and it remains white. And taste different than dried walnut.
We already established:
Apricots no
Plums and blackberries yes
I never knew green walnuts could be eaten. Sounds like something I would like though.
Does the survey include Canadians? I can tell you what we eat. /shakes box of Smarties.
It is a package deal, both America and America Lite included
my father had a way of doing it i have trouble replicating. He would put the tip of a knife in the middle where the nut attached to the bench and twist, separating in two halves and then used the knife to extract the nut. I just slice the husk, remove it a and crack the nut
Nutmeat………*snicker
i thought it a valid term
It is. But that won’t stop the inner Beavis from making itself known.
I never have. I didn’t even know that was a thing.
Vegan zombie says “mmm, membranes”
Apricots yes.
Also peaches, nectarines, pluots, plums, cherries, and pretty much any other stone fruit.
Americans like stone fruits and citrus. And some pomme fruits. No so big on the gooseberries.
Apricots no
Americans eat apricots just fine, it’s just we wait until they are ripe.
Walnuts are disgusting. Next.
Green walnuts; no. Ripe walnuts (and apricots); yes
Don’t those things have cyanide in common?
I’m trying to slowly build up my tolerance in case my wife gets any ideas.
Oh, you have one of those sweet, kind wives.
Yeah, mine would never go cyanide. Too subtle. Maybe machete. But never cyanide.
At least she doesn’t know how to start the chain saw….
I recommend Iocane.
“you fell one of the classic blunders! The 1st, is never get involved in a land war in Asia….”
And the second, only slightly less well know is to never start a movie-quote thread on a libertarian site!
Ripe walnuts: somewhat
Roasted walnuts: hell yeah
‘No amendment is absolute’.
This is frightening to even be saying this publicly.
Could America really head down a path where a war is fought between defenders of the Constitution and those against it?
It already is being fought…
And the constitutionalists have pretty much lost. Even the court’s conservatives seem to believe that you figure out which is the correct policy, then you back into how to support that with precedent and law.
Which is, of course, how you do it if you are an attorney arguing for your client.
But when you are the judge, you are supposed to turn to the law first, using precedent as a guide. So turning to policy (or politics) first completely undermines the entire system.
This is how we get the left arguing that restrictions on political speech are constitutional, despite the fact that the entire point of the first amendment’s speech protections was to protect political speech from government interference.
And “common sense” policy on gun control is how we get judges reading “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” as meaning “we can have almost total restriction on buying, selling, owning and making weapons with only small carvouts for ‘personal firearms’.” Even the far right of the judiciary and elected politicians agree on this… they are just arguing about how tight to make those last bits of restrictions.
I can read. “not infringed” is really strong language. Having a law that prohibits owning machine guns is definitely in the category of “infringing”.
Doesn’t matter if it is bad policy. The language of the law is unambiguous. Don’t like it, make a change via the amendment process.
“figure out which is the correct policy”
figure out which is the popular policy that will keep those cocktail party invites coming
It was early morning when the chemical attack commenced. It was a cool morning so perfect sleeping weather. The stream of death spray was shot from a distance of 12 feet and there were many casualties. DIE WASP DEMONS…..DIE!!!!! The nest is eradicated.
That is one of the most satisfying moments in life.
My epic battle with an absolutely enormous underground yellow jacket nest near my driveway when I lived in Atlanta gives me both pride and shudders of horror. I left them in peace until they decided that I wasn’t allowed to mow my lawn any more. Then it was war!
Their multiple entrances made the battle longer than I’d suspected. Two weeks of treatment to the exits finally did the trick. And as you said… from a distance. Those suckers are mean!
LawnGuy Land in the Summer. I’m doing craft services for outdoor location shoots. I had to build multiple bottle/sugar water traps and place them in spots around but way from my tables. It was fascinating to watch Yellow Jackets eat summer sausage though. They dig bits out with their mandibles, roll the meat into wee balls and fly away with it.
Yeah, and they gave me the distinct impression that they wanted to treat my corpse exactly the same way.
Important safety note…. do not operate a lawnmower within 5 feet of a large yellow jacket nest. They do not respect property owner’s rights. In fact, they are avowed anarchists who believe in squatter’s rights and are willing to defend those rights with violence.
And they will fly up pant legs as you walk over their ground nests.
“A sit-in is a form of nonviolent protest that involves people occupying an area to promote political social or economic change.”
Sigh. The reasons why they worked in the civil rights era was because they were not allowed to be in those stores. Just occupying a building is not very endearing.
Shhh….. he’s on a roll!
14 shootings over the week-end in….Toronto.
https://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2019/08/05/five-injured-one-with-life-threatening-injuries-after-shooting-in-north-york-nightclub.html
What is up with the Canadian obsession with guns?
Why does this only happen in Canada?
Must be those guns the buy from Indiana.
Planner-in-Chief
It’s an ambitious, if not downright impossible, goal — one that would attempt to shift US levels of gun violence down to that of America’s developed peers. But Warren’s plan goes further than the typical Democratic proposals, which are mostly focused on universal background checks and an assault weapons ban, to start moving America in that direction.
“We might not know how to get all the way there yet,” Warren acknowledges in a Medium post. “But we’ll start by implementing solutions that we believe will work. We’ll continue by constantly revisiting and updating those solutions based on new public health research.”
Her proposal begins with executive actions to expand background checks, close loopholes in current gun laws, and target gun traffickers and licensed gun dealers who break the law. She proposes sweeping legislation, including universal background checks and an assault weapons ban but also a system requiring a license to buy and own guns as well as urban gun violence intervention programs.
She also vows to revisit the issue of guns every year, “adding new ideas and tweaking existing ones based on new data — to continually reduce the number of gun deaths in America.”
——
It’s unlikely that even these more ambitious proposals really could get America down to 80 percent fewer gun deaths, at least anytime soon. (That’d likely require a wholesale effort to reduce the US’s massive stockpile of guns.) But Warren’s plan at least takes a serious jab at the issue.
——
But she also proposes policies that go further than Democrats have generally gone, at least before 2020. For one, she proposes a federal system that would require everyone obtain a license to own and buy a gun. She would pair that with the mandatory registration of guns — essentially requiring, like cars, license and registration. It’s a system the research shows can reduce gun deaths more effectively than simple background checks, and a key reason why Warren’s home state of Massachusetts, with a similar system at the state level, has the lowest gun death rate in the country.
Warren also proposes a one-week waiting period for firearm purchases and a higher tax on gun manufacturers. And with her assault weapons ban, she proposes a program that would force current assault weapon owners — with the threat of penalties — to dispose or register the guns.
The Constitution is just a fucking piece of paper.
I’ll protect you, America. Good and hard.
Really?
No. It is low, however; Massachusetts is in the bottom quartile for gun murder rate, but 6 states have a lower rate: North Dakota, Utah, Rhode Island, Oregon, New Hampshire, and Hawaii. North Dakota and Maine have pretty much the same rate of gun murder (1.2 per 100,000) but far laxer laws. Massachusetts’s low ranking for gun murders is strongly connected to Boston’s fairly low ranking for violent crime compared to similarly sized cities (ditto Minnesota and Minneapolis/St. Paul).
Boston’s fairly low ranking for violent crime
Better at hiding the bodies?
Maybe. Regardless, the relatively low crime rate in Boston has little to do with Massachusetts’s gun control laws, most of which were enacted in the past 20 years. The state’s murder rate trend has closely tracked the national average, but it’s almost always been less than half of it.
Murders per 100,000 people:
1960: MA 1.4, US 5.1
1970: MA 3.5, US 7.9
1980: MA 4.1, US 10.2
1990: MA 4.0, US 9.4
2000: MA 2.0, US 5.5
2010: MA 3.3, US 4.8
2016: MA 2.0, US 5.4
There’s an outlier around 2010 (when all of the current laws were in effect except red flag) but even then it only got to 70% of the national average, before dropping to less than 50% again by 2016.
Yeah, I would put demographics and the current state of gang relations above gun laws when making these comparisons. Hell, I’ll even give the Man some credit for their efforts in rounding up gang members. Who do tend to ignore gun laws, after all.
There is currently no well explained mechanism for why crime surged so greatly in the 1970s-1990s. We are at almost 1960s levels of crime again, but our incarceration rate is almost 4 times what it was then. I’m sure police tactics explain some of the decline since the peak around 1990 but I don’t think it explains all of it.
Aging population.
Violent crime is typically committed by men between 16-40. Now we’re just too old for this shit.
That’s an interesting argument. The time when the crime rate was highest roughly corresponds to when the baby boomers were 15-30 years old.
“one that would attempt to shift US levels of gun violence”
What about just violence?
Shhh….. they aren’t even worried about shifting levels of gun violence. Because if they were, they’d notice that all violent crime, including gun related violent crime, is down. Way down. Down by more than 50% since peaking 40 years ago.
And from my experience watching the firearms market over the past 50 years or so interest and market share of military style rifles/carbines has expanded significantly pretty much inversely to the drop in violent crime. I remember going to gun shows in Texas in the 1970’s and early 1980’s when you might see a half dozen AR’s and no AK’s yet.
Yeah, when I was a kid you aspired to a showpiece hunting rifle with beautifully crafted wood accents.
An AK-47 was a Soviet weapon, so not “cool” at all. Maybe some military collector would have one, but other than that, not so much.
Vietnam wasn’t in the past yet, so M-16 look-alikes weren’t cool yet either. Cool military weapons were WWII vintage. So you saw plenty of M1’s and 1911’s at gun shows. I didn’t know anyone who shot M1’s, but a few friends had them from military surplus stores. I should have invested in those… as I recall they were dirt cheap at the time.
Do they still have “Army Surplus” stores? I haven’t seen one in many years.
We used to bop in there as kids. It was the greatest playground for little boys. Gas masks. Training grenades (much heavier than you’d think, especially if you are 7). And stacks of rifles, right out where we could play with them.
Cans of surplus military food. Loads of camo netting… boy, I really wanted a bunch of camo netting for my room. And ammo cans! Those are great!
I can’t be the only kid around here who used to love those places. You can still get that stuff, but it sure isn’t cheap like it used to be. I wanna say those ammo cans were like a buck or two. And the rifles were what? $20? $50? I don’t remember, because I wasn’t buying one at that age…
The father of two of my friends owned the Army Surplus in town when I was growing up. We had free reign on items and could use them if we returned them. This led to many camo clad night ops of mischief. There is one store left around here and they just have junk now and the occasional ammo can. The ammo cans are very popular with the river running crowd so they are priced high because those people have money. The cans are used for everything from storage to the Groover.
They seem to be disappearing. The one nearby is a sad shell of its former self. You can smell mildew and mold on the gear when you walk in.
On the plus side, online sales means you can get exactly what you want in a couple of days.
There are 3 or 4 in the greater metro area where I live (in the heart of deep blue progtopia no less).
I remember when any registered full-auto rifle would be cheaper than the semi-auto version because of all the paperwork and the $200 tax stamp (lots of people thought you paid that every year). I still have a Shotgun News from 1986 to prove this. I could have picked up a half-dozen “junky old WWII 1911’s” at any gun show for under $150 a piece.
The Civilian Marksmanship Program was selling excess weaponry, carbines, 1911s, maybe M1s at like $15 a pop. A friend bought one of each and now is woke, I shot the carbine a year or two ago, he had never shot it about 40-50 years. I’m hoping he’ll want to unload the carbine before it becomes contraband.
http://thecmp.org/
I still kick myself for not ordering from them 20 years ago. Or picking up that surplus WWII M1911 at the gun store for $500.
A license to exercise a constitutional right? Eat a dick Liz, that opens a whole can of worms that’s far larger than even the gun issue.
Well, let’s take the stated objective seriously (instead of the unstated objective of disarming the public). Reducing deaths from guns.
Of the thirty plus thousand gun deaths in the US, more than 20k are suicides. So 2/3 of all “gun violence” are suicides. Presumably this is because it is the quickest and most effective method of actually killing yourself.
Homicides are 11,000. Way, way too many, but not remotely the same problem as the suicide bucket.
Of those 11k, nearly 9k are gang related murders. Wow.
Now we are down to less than 3k.. actually closer to 2k non-gang murders. This is the group targeted by gun control legislation, and includes the couple hundred (or less, the data is spikey) due to mass shootings. This is the gun violence we fear.
So why do we use the figures based on 30k total gun related deaths instead of 2k.
Neil deGrasse Tyson may have been on to something with his innumeracy tweet. If we were really worried about preventing death, there’s loads of other places to target. And if we were really worried about people dying due to guns, we’d be targeting depression and suicide… which we are not.
And if we were worried about people being shot by other people, we’d be targeting gang violence. But that might be racist or something. So totally off limits.
No… instead let’s make sure that the middle class factory worker who lives in a middle class neigborhood isn’t armed. That’ll solve the problem!
I wonder what those illegal gangs who trade in illegal guns will do when it becomes illegal for them to buy guns?
Those are great numbers to understand and have handy. The “9,000” gang-related murders are extraordinarily significant – given that they are 1) the lion’s share of all actual murders and 2) nothing even close to “bad guy kills innocent citizen”. You can’t even pretend that the outcome couldn’t easily have been the other way (“perp” kills “victim” vs. “victim” kills “perp”). It’s easy to imagine a number of them were the outcome of a draw.
Indeed, the problem of “gun violence” is largely about suicide and gang violence. Japan has a comparable suicide rate but basically no guns; Brazil has a comparable level of gang violence but very strict laws on gun ownership. I pick these two for comparison because I think they are fairly comparable, despite the racism of most gun grabbers in excluding Brazil from their statistics and discourse. Without addressing the underlying factors, it is hard to actually reduce these things. Taking guns away from law-abiding citizens will not dent either of these.
Of course, the focus on “mass shootings” (sans gangs) exists for the same reason “Missing White Girl Syndrome” exists: the biases of the affluent, media-consuming primarily white demographic that drives the national public discourse.
Almost every mass shooter passed a background check, so why the fuck would those options be on the table?
Green walnuts???
I will eat sunflower seeds, but only if someone else has done the coolie labor of extracting them from their shells.
but spiting the husks on the ground is the best part of eating sunflower seeds.
You jest, but my daughter likes salted in the shell peanuts and sunflower seeds *exclusively* for the salt on the shell. She doesn’t even eat the peanut/seed.
I’m just gonna cut out the middle man and go down to the feed store and pick up a salt lick.
the salt on the shell is great i agree
Finally this foreigner is making sense.
although to be fully romanian you need to sit on the curb and drink beer while eating sunflower seeds, either a can or a two liter plastic bottle.
*ponders moving to Romania*
Wearing an Adidas tracksuit, right?
no, not Slavs
Meet the Press is on.
Trump is a white supremacist because ICE raids.
Do these folks ever mention that Trump has actually proven to be incompetent at deporting people, failing to even approach the worst numbers Obama put up?
Chuck Todd is outraged. Outraged, I say.
Why weren’t all the managers and corporate officers perp walked for the cameras? Why isn’t the CEO of Smithfield in jail?
Uh… I’ll bet an audit is underway. And if they find out that they didn’t have the required documents for each employee, that may very well happen.
Heh, Smithfield is owned by the Chinese who bought it with backing from Goldman Sachs.
The previous CEO/founder, Joe Luter is long gone and probably laughing his ass off on his 32,000 acre estate in Argentina.
I’ll bet an audit is underway. And if they find out that they didn’t have the required documents for each employee, that may very well happen.
My guess is a big
fineshakedown.Maybe, the Chinese ownership angle has changed things a bit for them compared to how they got off on charges in previous years.
Hard to get to know the local customs… like where to leave the large bundles of cash.
After Trump sent that guy into Walmart to shoot those people, he rubbed salt in the wound by arresting all those chicken butchers!
The Obamas could shit on a plate and film it for 90 minutes and it would get a standing ovation in Cannes, win multiple awards and be a hit with the believers. That doesn’t change the fact that his contract with Netflix was just payback for Obama making net neutrality rules that favored Netflix. And now we’re all dead because Trump wouldn’t get on board with the same rules.
I’ll say it again, Obama is a Chicago-Machine politician. That means that first and foremost, he is corrupt and absolutely willing to use all aspects of Leviathan to get want he wants, including one-party domination of the government.
We would have been better off with Dennis Kucinich, who’s just a loon.
He did great for the leviathan. He increased spending by a trillion dollars per year without anyone noticing, because of the financial crisis. All he did was fail to submit a budget – bada-bing! One continuing resolution after another and the wheels got greased to the tune of nearly 4 trillion dollars. With a 4 trillion dollar take, there’s plenty of slop for the face-man to wet his beak.
Kamala Harris is really good at slipping back and forth between health “care” and health “insurance coverage”.
For most on the left the terms are interchangeable.
And “insurance” means “I get more benefits than I pay.”
Hey, it “works” for Social Security!
Back from vacation.
What did I miss?
DOOOOOOOOOOM
He’s been back for a while now. IIRC, he amuses himself by changing the locks on HM’s office.
I see the Clinton Machine took care of another loose end in the last few days.
That is getting far less traction than I thought it would. Everyone around here made that joke as soon as he got arrested. But it seems like the press has developed collective amnesia and the entire “Lolita Express” story never existed.
So their conspiracy theory is that Trump did it.
I little as I can muster up pity for the demise of that pedo-pimp it just fascinates me that he could not see it coming. The outcome was going to be digital – no in-between – he a) would get away scot-free for the rest of his life or b) one day they would come for his scalp. And after the first go-round he should have seen it coming.
Had I woken up in his skin soon after his first brush with the law I would have created a second identity with no ties to who I am (in a different country with all legal documents, passport, etc), made at least 20% of my net worth available to that identity (gold bullion, bit coin, etc), studied the language of that identity on the DL, and then arranged a kayaking/boating/skydiving accident with the body not being recovered. Disappear, travel for a few months, show up in “the old country” with a different appearance and a story about how may parents moved to the US when I was a baby but I never fit in there. Open a coffee shop in a small city and forget who I was before.
This is a guy who wanted to seed the world with his progeny. Narcissistic personality disorder is known as a disorder for a reason.
He was standing in the middle of the tracks, the train was bearing down on him with the headlights on and blowing its whistle non-stop and he still didn’t see it coming.
Fucking federalism- how does it work?
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has defied California regulators by no longer approving labels claiming Monsanto Roundup is known to cause cancer.
The California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment has listed glyphosate, a chemical compound-base for Monsanto Roundup herbicide weed killer, as causing cancer since July 2017. Furthermore, glyphosate was added to the state’s Proposition 65 list, which requires businesses to warn customers about chemicals known to cause cancer.
The EPA defied that regulation Thursday by saying it will no longer approve product labels claiming glyphosate is known to cause cancer.
“It is irresponsible to require labels on products that are inaccurate when EPA knows the product does not post a cancer risk,” the EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a statement.
The federal government is not bound by California administrative laws? That’s just crazy.
i find “it is known to” strange as an expression. may cause would be better
Or, more scientifically, is proven safe and effective.
is proven safe and effective. – meh. i doubt that
Here’s a left wing (NPR) piece that is slanted toward the anti-roundup side.
Even this piece will give you the impression that it is very safe.
Even the anti-roundup warnings are extremely weak – they say “can cause cancer” because they have studies that show that in theory it might, maybe cause cancer at high doses. So does caffeine. And butyric acid (from butter). And just about anything tested by these methodologies.
while i do not think it is necessarily a problem I generally disagree with proven safe given the general state of human related effects science at this time
We’ve done the experiment…. it has been used on most of the corn and soybeans produced in the US for the last 20 years. The guinea pigs are all of us, all farm workers, all chemical plant workers producing glyphosphate…. it has been popular on the market for 40 years and has been sprayed over a huge chunk of the US for 20 years….
And the epidemiology shows…
no increase in cancer – particularly the types of cancer that they indicated it “may cause”. You aren’t going to get a bigger study than hundreds of millions of people. It can detect effect sizes that are really, really tiny. So any significant risk of cancer would be easy to spot. It would be dose-dependent, so you’d see chemical workers and transportation workers getting lots of cancer, farm workers less, but still lots, and people living near farms also getting cancers… you don’t see that.
Sometimes it is the left that is anti-science.
In this case it is going to be driven forward by the trial lawyers. And they are going with the “they have internal memos that say they need to lobby to keep warning labels off of Roundup” method of proving intentional harm, so they can get multi-hundred-million dollar verdicts. Of course they have zero chance of actually proving any harm at all, let alone specific harm. But they’ll still win in court for a while. Might bankrupt Bayer like they did Dow Corning before it was generally accepted that the entire thing about breast implants was bogus.
Roundup is many, many orders of magnitude safer than the alternatives. And roundup-ready GMO crops have been a huge boon to farm production while eliminating poisonous effects of earlier generation herbicides.
It is all win. Any downside is so tiny as to be undetectable, but the upside is so huge that even if it did cause very small amounts of cancer, it would be orders of magnitude better than the products it replaced. So still a win.
we need Taleb to call you a Monsanto shill
More deeply ingrained than shilling…. this is me..
Well it is and your wrong, you eat gmo food every day
you eat gmo food every day – who gave you my shopping list
Here’s a more scholarly summary than my off-the-top-of-my-head ramblings.
And I’m sure that all of the big social media companies have a better idea of what you eat than you do.
They even knew that I was talking about roundup on this page when I flipped over to another tab to search for the science-based medicine article. They auto-completed “roundup” before I even typed the full “science based”.
Kinda spooky.
But in order to drill down on that one you have to understand that Europe has a big interest in taking an anti-GMO stance (allows them to restrict US agricultural products, protecting their own). And then you have to understand that this anti-GMO stance is related to Roundup because the biggest GMO use thusfar is making Roundup-ready crops that can be sprayed with the broad-spectrum herbicide glyphosphate, killing any and all weeds. And then you need to understand that the anti-GMO funding related to this has been used to sponsor a highly flawed study that shows that rats that get cancer super-easy can be shown to get cancer in some subgroup when treated with huge amounts of glyphosphate. In other words, an entirely disreputable study.
But then you need to understand that the WHO is kinda dominated by European antiGMO folks and even then they weren’t gonna take this stand, but some particularly anti-GMO folks at the top shoved it in to their list.
And then you need to understand that California is home to a bunch of left-wing anti-GMO folks who are looking for any fig leaf to hang their anti-GMO ideology on….
Well, you get the picture.
The other prong of this same attack is to find anyone who worked with, near or heard of roundup and later got cancer so they can sue. Because the courts are a wonderful place to appeal to sympathy and get huge verdicts out of evil corporations. (see Corning, Dow)
They are not only wrong, they are on the side of evil in this one. But they are winning in a lot of important ways. In the long run they’ll lose, but they are gonna harm a lot of people along the way.
You put enough of anything in a rat’s body and it will die, typically of cancer. But most people don’t understand what cancer is, nor the first rule of toxicology: poison is in the dose.
The US government defied the California government.
Huh?
It will make more sense after Kamala abolishes the electoral college.
It is Kamala Harris. She won’t just abolish. She’ll prosecute. And find some trumped up charges that are so heinous that she can offer a plea deal for 25 years in prison and it will sound like a good deal.
You heard it here first… Harris is gonna throw the Electoral College in jail.
Huh?
That’s exactly what I said.
That’s about the only possible initial reaction, isn’t it? Just a dumbfounded, Huh?
How do people write like this and not notice it? More to the point, how does this make it past an editor?
America changed: Anxiety simmers as mass shootings loom any time, anywhere
See, that’s just the problem. Mass shootings don’t loom any time, any where. We get a couple of these ever year or two. It doesn’t even rise the level of threat of getting an infected pimple and dying of sepsis.
Yet we live in fear!
Neal deGrasse-Tyson is a tool, but his tweet was right on target. Too bad he was cowed into retracting it. That was a discussion worth having. As was the discussion of “which is a more proximate cause of mass shootings… cool looking AR-style guns, or politically motivated wall-to-wall coverage of mass shootings that elevate mass shooters to cultural icon status?”
‘Cause I know which one I think is more directly linked to the rise of the public mass shooting over the last 20 years.
By the time they get the stricter gun control they’re demanding, this trend will likely be on the wane. So they’ll get to do a victory dance for fixing a problem their actions had nothing to do with. See also: Presidents claiming credit for an economy they (thankfully) don’t control.
All true…. but I did hear an interesting conversation on that topic.
TV’s “Mr Wonderful” from the show Shark Tank dipped his toe in libertarian waters and did an interview over at TOS.
He gives Trump loads of credit for changing the world for small and midsized business. He talked about how active everything is because they can get things done so much faster now. He said the states are following the Feds lead – when the fed gets rid of something, a lot of the states get rid of it too. He said he’s never seen economic activity like he has the last two years (dude is like 65) and owns a bunch of companies.
So there’s that.
I have not heard anyone talking about the results of deregulation in the media before that. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to know that there was a push for deregulation under way – except when they completely make something up as a scare tactic. Like “Trump got rid of Obama rules that kept mentally ill people from getting guns”.
That is where Trump has done the most good (unfortunately, it is mostly impermanent, but that’s not his fault, really). However, the economy was well into recovery from the last recession when he took office, and it will go into recession again (I have no idea when). If it happens during Trump’s time as President, will it be his fault?
LOL