Rule number 2: Going on The Daily Show to show what you are really nice guy.
Jim Kramer of Mad Money’s evisceration was, until last night, the reigning champion of this, but his take down last night of former judge Andrew Napolitano’s ignorant and bigoted spew of Neo-Confederate talking points about Abraham Lincoln mad that look like a tea party.
I’ll not show you an interview, I’ll just show you the (I sh%$ you not) game show segment.
It is unbelievably brutal:
Funny, but unbelievably brutal.
I am referring, of course to Ben Franklin.
Andy Kaufman has nothing on post-death humor.
Specifically, when I blamed Ben Franklin for creating Daylight Saving Time, I neglected to do my research.
It turns out that Ben Franklin’s suggestion was satire:
During his time as an American envoy to France, Benjamin Franklin, publisher of the old English proverb, “Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise”, anonymously published a letter suggesting that Parisians economize on candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight. This 1784 satire proposed taxing shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise. Franklin did not propose DST; like ancient Rome, 18th-century Europe did not keep precise schedules. However, this soon changed as rail and communication networks came to require a standardization of time unknown in Franklin’s day.
I must remember: Google before shooting off my mouth.
It appears that I am not a hoopy frood who knows where my towel is.
He invented Daylight Savings Time, so he is evil, QED.
While I do not dispute his contributions to science and governance in the US, he had to be evil to devise Daylight Savings Time.
At the New Yorker, Natalia Antelava notes that Crimean Tatars are completely without any ally or patron:
At first, Rustem Kadyrov could barely make out the mark outside his house, in the Crimean town of Bakhchysarai, but it filled him with terror. It was an X, cut deep into the gray metal of the gate, and its significance cut even deeper, evoking a memory Kadyrov shares with all Crimean Tatars. Kadyrov, who is thirty-one, grew up hearing stories about marks on doors. In May of 1944, Stalin ordered his police to tag the houses of Crimean Tatars, the native Muslim residents of the peninsula. Within a matter of days, all of them—almost two hundred thousand people—were evicted from their homes, loaded onto trains, and sent to Central Asia, on the pretext that the community had collaborated with the Nazi occupation of Crimea.
Kadyrov’s grandmother, Sedeka Memetova, who was eight at the time, was among those deported. “The soldiers gave us five minutes to pack up,” she told me, when I visited the family on Thursday. “We left everything behind.” Memetova still has vivid memories of her journey into exile: the stench of the overcrowded train carriage, the wailing of a pregnant woman who sat next to her, and the solemn faces of the men who had to lower the bodies of their children off of the moving train—the only way, she said, to dispose of the dead. Four of her siblings were among the thousands of Crimean Tatars who never even made it to their final destination, Uzbekistan.
Starting in the nineteen-sixties, the Soviet Union began to allow survivors of the deportation to return. Memetova and her family came back to Crimea almost three decades ago, in 1987. This weekend, at around 3 P.M. on Saturday, Memetova’s forty-four-year-old daughter, Ava, looked out the window and saw four young men, strangers to the neighborhood, walking down the street, armed with batons. The men were also carrying pieces of paper, Ava told me—which she believes were lists of homes belonging to Crimean Tatars. Seventy years after Memetova’s deportation, her house had been marked once again. “Just as we thought we finally had a future,” she said. “How could anyone do this in the twenty-first century?”
On one side of the conflict are the Russians, (Yes, I know that Stalin was a Georgian) who engaged in Genocide in 1944, and on the other side is the neo-Nazi influenced government in Kiev.
It’s kind of like what happened to the Roma following the fall of the Warsaw pact.
The new Europe has some frightening echos to the interwar years.
In response to Georgia’s issuing a vanity plate featuring the Klu Klux Klan Confederate Battle Flag, John Perr comes up with a parody that is pure genius.
The only thing that could make this better would be if this were true:
The state of Georgia this week began offering a new version of its vehicle license plate featuring the Confederate battle flag. Sponsored by the Georgia division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (to whom a portion of the purchase price and annual registration fees will go), the revised design has many people inside the state and out howling mad.
In response to the outcry, Georgia SCV commander Jack Bridwell asked, “What’s the big deal?” Echoing Bridwell’s explanation that “the design is just people trying to show who they are and trying to be proud of their heritage,” Sons of Confederate Veterans spokesman Ray McBerry invited other groups to do the same:“We believe that all people ought to be able to celebrate their history and their heritage, and that includes Southerners. We did anticipate that there could be some folks who would not like that, but we encourage them to go and make application for their own specialty plates.”
Now, a little known organization is taking him up on the offer. The group, calling itself The American People, is sponsoring a license plate to mark the 150th anniversary of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea.
After capturing the South’s vital manufacturing center and rail hub at Atlanta, Sherman’s troops marched southeast to Savannah leaving a swath of ruin in their wake. Between November 15th and December 21st, 1864, Sherman more than accomplished his objective to “create havoc and destruction of all resources that would be beneficial to the enemy.” Sherman’s brilliant campaign (or what the Sons of Confederate Veterans brand “atrocities and war crimes“) hastened the end of the Confederacy and with it the enslavement of four million Americans.
Read the rest, it’s brilliant, and if you know anyone in Georgia, have them petition for a vanity plate.
This is f%$3ing brilliant!
John Stewart and Larry Wilmore tear into professional bigot Fox News Legal analyst Andrew Napolitano for rolling out standard grossly KKK/Sons of the Confederacy lies.
Notice that they are both smiling.
They are f5$#ing outraged, and the smiles never leave their faces, and Wilmore draws blood when he compares Napolitano’s differing attitudes on the Civil War and the Revolutionary war, “You know, there’s something not right when you feel the only black thing worth fighting for is tea,” but he drives a much deserved stake through the anti-tax libertarianism espoused by Napolitano, and Fox, when he says, “You think it’s immoral for the government to reach into your pocket, rip your money away from its warm home and claim it as its own property, money that used to enjoy unfettered freedom is now conscripted to do whatever its new owner tells it to. Now, I know this is going to be a leap, but you know that sadness and rage you feel about your money? Well, that’s the way some of us feel about people.”
It’s frightening that such a contemptible human being as Napolitano was once a judge.
Just watch.
It appears that the hyper wealthy think that people not liking them or how they make money is just like the holocaust, “Seems like billionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins is very, very afraid of progressives. In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, Perkins expressed his deep fear that fascist progressives were going to burn down the city.”
He actually invoked Kristallnacht:
From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these “techno geeks” can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a “snob” despite the millions she has spent on our city’s homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.
This is ludicrous.
BTW, San Francisco has a law against private vehicles blocking bus-stops, as the aforementioned Google buses do. It’s a $271 fine, and this means something north of $½ billion in fines have been ignored by the city by various tech firms, because big tech is above the law.
The idea that somehow or other, either criticism or legitimate law enforcement actions directed toward the extremely wealthy is somehow a fascist style persecution against the 0.01% is both pernicious and laughable.
I was using Google to confirm the spelling of the word “Bated”, as in, “Bated breath,” the other day, and I came across its origins.
It turns out that it’s a diminutive form of the word “abated”, and the first recorded use was by William Shakespeare, specifically, Merchant of Venice, “Shall I bend low and in a bondman’s key, With bated breath and whispering humbleness, Say this; ‘Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last; You spurn’d me such a day; another time You call’d me dog; and for these courtesies I’ll lend you thus much moneys’?”
I already knew that the first recorded use of puke, actually the word puking, came from The Scottish Play.
I just think that it’s kinda cool.
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Normally, I do not watch the Superbowl for the Football.
When my team, Washington is playing, I do not watch.
The least time I did was Super Bowl XXII. I watched the first quarter, and Denver was leading 10-0, so when some friends came by suggesting dinner, I turned off the TV, and we left the hotel, (I was at a Boskone) and went put to eat.
I returned an the start of the third quarter, and the Redskins had scored 35 unanswered points.
I then realized that Washington had lost whenever I watched, and won when I hadn’t, so I do not watch them in that game.
You can call me superstitious, just don’t call me late for dinner.
So these days, I watch out for the ads, if I watch at all. (I saw Apple’s 1984 ad when our originally aired.)
However, there are some exceptions to this.
If the Buffalo Bills play the Minnesota Vikings, I’ll watch.
Another exception is if the Superbowl is played outside in inclement winter weather, as the Football gods intended.
This year, the game will be played at the stadium formerly known as The Meadowlands, in North Jersey, so there is a distinct possibility of real Football played in real Football weather.
So if the mercury is below -10°C, our of there is some serious snow, I well be watching.
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I’ve been thinking that on the observance of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday I should offer some sort of comment, and I’ve kind of been at a loss.
Driving to work today, I had a flash of insight.
It’s not deep, but it is glib, and I think that it is an evocative way to give the lie to the idea that somehow or other Obama is a successor to Kings legacy.
Beneficiary, yes, successor, no f%$#ing way.
More generally, I object to the the Disneyification of King’s memory.
At the core of his activism was a profound and deep moral outrage, and the process by which he has been reduced to some sort of “Magic Negro” by the mainstream media is a real shame.
It serves to dilute much of his message, which was not just about civil rights, but addressed poverty and labor rights as well.
The Great Molasses Flood of Boston:
On January 15, 1919—an unusually warm winter day in Boston—patrolman Frank McManus picked up a call box on Commercial Street, contacted his precinct station and began his daily report. Moments later he heard a sound like machine guns and an awful grating. He turned to see a five-story-high metal tank split open, releasing a massive wall of dark amber fluid. Temporarily stunned, McManus turned back to the call box. “Send all available rescue vehicles and personnel immediately,” he yelled, “there’s a wave of molasses coming down Commercial Street!”
More than 7.5 million liters of molasses surged through Boston’s North End at around 55 kilometers per hour in a wave about 7.5 meters high and 50 meters wide at its peak. All that thick syrup ripped apart the cylindrical tank that once held it, throwing slivers of steel and large rivets in all directions. The deluge crushed freight cars, tore Engine 31 firehouse from its foundation and, when it reached an elevated railway on Atlantic Avenue, nearly lifted a train right off the tracks. A chest-deep river of molasses stretched from the base of the tank about 90 meters into the streets. From there, it thinned out into a coating one half to one meter deep. People, horses and dogs caught in the mess struggled to escape, only sinking further.
Ultimately, the disaster killed 21 people and injured another 150. About half the victims were crushed by the wave or by debris or drowned in the molasses the day of the incident. The other half died from injuries and infections in the following weeks. A long ensuing legal battle revealed several possible reasons for the flood. The storage tank had been filled to near capacity on July 13 and the molasses had likely fermented, producing carbon dioxide that raised the pressure inside the cylinder. The courts also faulted the United States Industrial Alcohol Co., which owned the tank, for ignoring numerous signs of the structure’s instability over the years, such as frequent leaks.
The rest is even better, because they start to discuss things like Reynolds Numbers.
I got some serious geek on reading this.
Mikhail Kalashnikov, after decades of denying any culpability for the deaths caused by the AK-47, felt profound remorse toward the end of his life:
The inventor of the Kalashnikov assault rifle apparently wrote to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church before he died expressing fears he was morally responsible for the people it killed.
Mikhail Kalashnikov, who died last month aged 94, wrote a long emotional letter to Patriarch Kirill in May 2012, church officials say.
He said he was suffering “spiritual pain” over the many deaths it caused.
Kalashnikov had previously refused to accept responsibility for those killed.
It does make me wonder how I’ll deal with the end of my life.
As a firmly middle-aged man, my most frequent regret is how few wild oats I sewed during my single days.
Hopefully, my regrets will become more profound as I age, but I’m just not that deep.
Updated Pic. Starfleet Transportation
We were driving to an SCA event in DC, and I drove by a school bus, and saw this.
I pointed it put to Natalie, who then snapped these pix.
[on update]
There were issues with the photographs, etc. because of the mobile posting app.
So I have updated this to include:
BTW, in case you missed it, the bus is from Starfleet Transportation.
*Obviously, I am limiting my set “School Bus” to those vehicles that are actually colored school bus colors.
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I went to UMass from 1983 to 1987.
I got my degree there.
There was a fair amount of weirdness there when I went there. I imagine that there is still a fair amount of weirdness there now.
At least, there is symmetry.
Still, nothing could prepare me fopr tne news that UMass was rated as having the best college food in the nation.*
I remember eating there.
I remember when my friends ordered pizza delivered to the cafeteria.
I remember when they served chicken pucks. I remember when they served chicken pucks with tomato sauce and mystery cheese, and they called it “chicken parmesan.” (I called it “scabs”, which my table partners did not appreciate.)
What the f%$# has happened to my alma mater?
*And yes, “having the best college food in the nation,” is a lot like being the, “World’s tallest midget,” or being the, “Nation’s most ethical Republican.”
I agree with New York Times reporter Richard Pérez-Peña, that the range for the baby boom generation, 1946 to 1964, covers two distinct generations:
There is no baby boom generation.
Oh, sure, there was a baby boom: a neatly defined, pig-in-the-python bulge from 1946 to 1964. But the kind of broadly shared cultural experiences that could bind together people across that whole span? That just didn’t happen.
This year the youngest of the baby boomers — the youngest, mind you — turn 50. I hit that milestone a few months back. But we aren’t what people usually have in mind when they talk about boomers. They mean the early boomers, the postwar cohort, most of them now in their 60s —not us later boomers, labeled “Generation Jones” by the writer Jonathan Pontell.
I never had to worry about being drafted and sent to Vietnam.
I wasn’t a part of the job market until after the post war economic dynamism, along with the great compression between rich and poor, had ended.
I do not remember the Kennedy assassination.
I do not remember when the Beatles came to the US.
I do not remember the civil rights protests.
When I entered college, it was Punk and New Wave, not folksong inspired protest songs.
I have never felt any kinship with the generational experiences of the early Boomers.
I would also note that my experience is somewhat atypical, I was born in 1962, and lived in Alaska from 1963-1969, so I missed the 60s even from the perspective as a child.
Alaska was much more isolated than it is now. It didn’t even get direct dialed long distance until after we left the state.
On March 8, 1971, in Media, PA, a group of anonymous brave dissidents stole records from a local FBI office, revealing J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO program, of domestic spying and sabotage, and they mailed to various media sources.
Well, they are no longer anonymous:
The perfect crime is far easier to pull off when nobody is watching.
So on a night nearly 43 years ago, while Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier bludgeoned each other over 15 rounds in a televised title bout viewed by millions around the world, burglars took a lock pick and a crowbar and broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation office in a suburb of Philadelphia, making off with nearly every document inside.
They were never caught, and the stolen documents that they mailed anonymously to newspaper reporters were the first trickle of what would become a flood of revelations about extensive spying and dirty-tricks operations by the F.B.I. against dissident groups.
The burglary in Media, Pa., on March 8, 1971, is a historical echo today, as disclosures by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden have cast another unflattering light on government spying and opened a national debate about the proper limits of government surveillance. The burglars had, until now, maintained a vow of silence about their roles in the operation. They were content in knowing that their actions had dealt the first significant blow to an institution that had amassed enormous power and prestige during J. Edgar Hoover’s lengthy tenure as director.
“When you talked to people outside the movement about what the F.B.I. was doing, nobody wanted to believe it,” said one of the burglars, Keith Forsyth, who is finally going public about his involvement. “There was only one way to convince people that it was true, and that was to get it in their handwriting.”
Mr. Forsyth, now 63, and other members of the group can no longer be prosecuted for what happened that night, and they agreed to be interviewed before the release this week of a book written by one of the first journalists to receive the stolen documents. The author, Betty Medsger, a former reporter for The Washington Post, spent years sifting through the F.B.I.’s voluminous case file on the episode and persuaded five of the eight men and women who participated in the break-in to end their silence.
Unlike Mr. Snowden, who downloaded hundreds of thousands of digital N.S.A. files onto computer hard drives, the Media burglars did their work the 20th-century way: they cased the F.B.I. office for months, wore gloves as they packed the papers into suitcases, and loaded the suitcases into getaway cars. When the operation was over, they dispersed. Some remained committed to antiwar causes, while others, like John and Bonnie Raines, decided that the risky burglary would be their final act of protest against the Vietnam War and other government actions before they moved on with their lives.
These people are patriots and heroes, and the end
The passage of years has worn some of the edges off the once radical political views of John and Bonnie Raines. But they said they felt a kinship toward Mr. Snowden, whose revelations about N.S.A. spying they see as a bookend to their own disclosures so long ago.
They know some people will criticize them for having taken part in something that, if they had been caught and convicted, might have separated them from their children for years. But they insist they would never have joined the team of burglars had they not been convinced they would get away with it.
“It looks like we’re terribly reckless people,” Mr. Raines said. “But there was absolutely no one in Washington — senators, congressmen, even the president — who dared hold J. Edgar Hoover to accountability.”
“It became pretty obvious to us,” he said, “that if we don’t do it, nobody will.”
Law breaking and abuse of power, revealed by patriots.
J. Edgar Hoover was a deeply evil man who had no respect at all for civil rights and due process, and he had managed to blackmail his way into an unassailable center of power, and they helped stop him.
The distribution of these documents to the press, may not have been the end of abuses by the US state security apparatus, nor even the beginning of the end of abuses by the US state security apparatus, but at the very least it was the end of the beginning, to paraphrase Winston Churchill.
I would also note that in 1971 the press was not so cowed by the government that they would sit on the story, as the New York Times did in 2004.
People like this, and I am including Edward Snowden in this, are essential for the protection of democracy and civil rights.
Kalashnikov, father of the AK-47 assault rifle is dead at 94.
He was a giant in light weapons design, not quite at the level of John Browning or but certainly at the level of Eugene Stoner.
He did not produce the first mass produced assault rifle, that was the German StG-44, but he created a truly inexpensive (Once they got the stamped spot welded sheet metal receiver perfected with the AKM) weapon with reliability and simplicity that are still the standard. (Not so much on accuracy).
It fit the doctrine of the Soviet military, as well as the numerous irregular “liberation” movements throughout the world, and something in the neighborhood of 100 million have been produced to date.
Much of this production was because licenses to manufacture were freely and fully available to any government that indicates some sort of favor toward “international socialism”.
In a very real way, this was an open source licensing model applied to steel, wood, and lead.
As such, it is doubtlessly responsible for more deaths than any other military firearm in history.
And yes, Neanderthal genes are in all of us, so they are in part our ancestors.
One of the enduring myths about Homo neanderthalensis (some would argue Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) is that they lacked the vocal structures to have our fluidity of speech.
30 years ago, the model that showed this was debunked because it was shown that it also prevented H neanderthalensis from swallowing.
The theory only barely passed the laugh test for about 5 years, but you still hear it coming up all the time.
One of the reasons for this is that the bone at the base of the tongue, the Hyloid is unattached to the rest of the skeleton, and fragile, so the fissile record is meager.
Well, they have found a Neanderthal hyloid, and it was very similar to ours, and now a group of scientist have modeled the Hyloid, and the surriounding soft tissues, and determined that they were very chatty folk:
An analysis of a Neanderthal’s fossilised hyoid bone – a horseshoe-shaped structure in the neck – suggests the species had the ability to speak.
This has been suspected since the 1989 discovery of a Neanderthal hyoid that looks just like a modern human’s.
But now computer modelling of how it works has shown this bone was also used in a very similar way.
Writing in journal Plos One, scientists say its study is “highly suggestive” of complex speech in Neanderthals.
The hyoid bone is crucial for speaking as it supports the root of the tongue. In non-human primates, it is not placed in the right position to vocalise like humans.
An international team of researchers analysed a fossil Neanderthal throat bone using 3D x-ray imaging and mechanical modelling.
This model allowed the group to see how the hyoid behaved in relation to the other surrounding bones.
Stephen Wroe, from the University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia, said: “We would argue that this is a very significant step forward. It shows that the Kebara 2 hyoid doesn’t just look like those of modern humans – it was used in a very similar way.”
Personally, I think that it is difference in fecundity that led to Neanderthals being supplanted by modern humans, but I am not a paleoanthropologist.
No, I don’t mean the word, “Sh%$,” though the Germans have many words for excrement, I mean the word Stasi, as in the East German secret police:
The dispute also reflects very different views of how far the state should go in conducting surveillance, both at home and abroad.
In an angry conversation with Mr. Obama in October after the phone monitoring was revealed, Ms. Merkel said that the N.S.A.’s activities reminded her of growing up as the daughter of a Protestant minister in East Germany. “She told him, ‘This is like the Stasi,’ ” said one person who had discussed the conversation with the chancellor.
Another person familiar with the conversation said Ms. Merkel had told Mr. Obama that she was particularly angry that, based on the disclosures, “the N.S.A. clearly couldn’t be trusted with private information, because they let Snowden clean them out.”
This is, to quote Joe Biden, a “Big f%$#ing deal.”
Angela Merkel grew up in the DDR, and this likely not a term that she invokes lightly.
The capabilities of our state security apparatus are remarkable, but the custodians of those capabilities, the NSA, CIA, and the rest of the three letter acronyms, cannot be trusted to deploy these capabilities in the best interest of the United States.
They are simply too enamored of their abilities, and so act without regard to the consequences of a potential failure.
This is the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.