A story with a point other than my liking the sound of my own typing: Once upon a time, the managing partner at the Psychopaths decided that people were taking too much time to go to too many doctors appointments. This was not exactly true but she got it in her head it was so.
The office manager put out a memo saying that the new office policy was that you couldn't work to make up hours; that all dr. appts had to be either the first or last of the day; and that if you had to leave during work hours to go to the dr., you had to use a half vacation day.
I read this, laughed hysterically, and then went to talk to her. I pointed out that the impact of this was not that people would go to the doctor less; it would result in people refusing to work a second longer than necessary and people being out of the office for 5 hours, not 3.
I'm trying to decide why Valheim is so addicting as I yell because I accidentally kited a troll to my house and it's smashing it. It's because it's *forgiving*. Once I waited the troll out, I could repair the house with no repair costs. Construction refunds 100% (well usually)
Eating gives you a buff, you will never die of starvation. When you die of stupid, you can run back and reclaim all your stuff. If you want to rush through to gear up to beat the bosses, do it. If you (me) want to putter and build a house and THE BEES BETTER BE HAPPY, do that.
The lofi graphics combined with really great lighting effects is lovely. The building can be a bit wonky but that may be input error more than the game ahem. It just hits that perfect spot of cozy and fighting and SCREW YOU GREYDWARVES!
I read this shaking my head that the author was ignoring the sneering that was done by many of Con Inc towards those screaming about normalizing trade with China over human rights concerns. Then I looked at the bio for the author. He likely wasn't alive then. He may not know.
How many political junkies remember that in 1992 Clinton ran to the right of Bush on trade with China? As @GeoGDF01 noted, a major plot driver of The Bear and the Dragon by Tom Clancy is the Catholic and Evangelical Christian world boycotting China. That was nearly 21 years ago.
The author is listed as a WFB Fellow in political journalism at NRI. This is for recent college graduates. It is fair to assume he wasn't alive in 1992 and was, at best, a very small child in 2001 when China received MFN status. He did not grow up watching these arguments.
Let us look back at fairly recent history for a moment, shall we? Beginning in mid September and growing louder in October, 2016, a campaign of there is an explosive document out there that if you only saw it would destroy Trump and you need to know about this!
This wasn't even Sources Say, this was I am such an insider that I have seen this thing and *pearl clutch* if only I could tell you but trust me. My response was publish it then. If it is so explosive and so important, publish it. If it is that important, let me see it.
Cut to January, 2017 and Buzzfeed publishing the Steele fanfic I mean dossier and there it was. That was what Our Super Duper Ultra Connected Insiders meant and, apparently, believed to their hearts that it was true. Trump was being run by Russia! Russia Russia Russia!
This tweet contains an elision that needs to be called out forcibly. There's a fundamental difference in kind between people who attended the rally and the idiots who deserve their idiot prizes who broke into the Capitol. Referring to "the crowd" equates the two, purposefully so.
The crowd did no such thing. This is not a Simpsons episode where everyone showed up with torches and pitchforks. Some number, and hell if I can find that number, broke into the Capitol. The vast majority of people there did no such thing.
There's a major push right now to say that every person that went to the rally is a domestic terrorist and should be treated as such. And, shockingly only if you haven't paid attention since 2015, the Hate Object Is Orange crowd is right there howler monkeying right alongside.
Let's chat about the McCarthy article and why I state that he cannot maintain a consistent position within the article. Let's look at this:
In the space of a few paragraphs, he goes from He did not want them to storm the building. He did not want people to be killed and injured to reckless encouragement and depraved indifference. McCarthy is stating that Trump did not and then did have mens rea as is convenient.
Not only is that intellectually inconsistent, it's outright insulting that McCarthy thinks we will not remember what we read not a few seconds before. Not to mention that McCarthy said this at the beginning of the article:
In which I make friends and influence people: To all y'all who are shocked and stunned at the COVID relief act being attached to a must pass spending bill and then that bill being larded up with everything but what the relief act is supposed to be, how new are you, exactly?
It has been ever so. For as long as I can remember, this is how Congress operates. Play brinkmanship with something, anything, that there is public clamoring must be done, then attach that to an, at best, somewhat related spending bill and lard it up. This is decades old.
The only thing that surprised me about the bill is that it didn't top 6,000 pages and that actual physical copies of it were printed out for show before the vote took place. All the rest of it? Of course that was how it was, it was always going to be.
Since I have been highly critical of the manner in which those on the Right are trying to get those in GA to vote for the Republican senators, I feel it is only fair that I set out how I would go about it rather than simply sniping from the sidelines. So here we go.
Given the last few years, to say nothing of the last few decades, it is reasonable for those who lean more towards the conservative side of being a Republican to feel that promises are always made by the GOP but nearly never kept. This does not engender trust by the base.
Likewise, every election is the most important ever and if you do not vote Republican you are assisting in electing Democrats and it will be the end of life as we know it! At a certain point, weariness over such claims is natural. That is one of the lessons of Peter and the Wolf.
I do not care who you are, if you state that the way I can help the Republicans win in GA is to give money, I am ignoring anything you say about that race forever. No. Get your hand out of my pocket. Next up after election fraud? Let's look deeply into campaign spending.
I am by no means wah wah wah campaign financing needs to have stricter rules wah wah wah. No. Nope. But I do think the incestuous world of consultants and advisers and PR firms and ad agencies and ad buyers needs scrutinized deeply by those who donate.
There have been many pixels slain regarding the various and sundry PACs that spring up to take advantage of the crisis du jour. That is good. But how about looking deeply into the NRSC? How about the RNC itself? Let us yarn wall those connections, shall we?
Yeah, this bit below is why I do not take seriously the claims by the Republican political punditry class that they truly care about election fraud. The hand wave here is a middle finger. And, yes, I read the whole article.
Either election fraud matters or it does not. And the tone of the discussion about it matters deeply. That op ed was a primal screech about how horrible Trump is. That's fine. It is beyond fair to note the court losses. I am utterly agnostic on all the Dominion stuff.
But what is contemptible, and I am stating this with the exact same degree of contempt that article has for Trump and that tuned to the finest degree, is to throw in there the in passing oh sure there were issues yeah we should look at those. Oh please. Give it up.
So. About these flash drives that apparently are used all over the country for votes and I'm just going to set all of that aside. I have the following questions: 1. How are the drives sourced? 2. Are the drives completely reformatted prior to be used for election purposes?
3. How are the drives marked to identify the precinct for which the drive was used? 4. What human being is given custody of the drive initially? 5. What human being is given custody at the precinct? 6. Is only one person allowed to use the drive? If not, how many users are there
7. Is an audit trail kept of every single human being who had touched the drive? 8. How is the data transferred accomplished? 9. What training are the people using the drive given on the data transfer process? 10. What program is used for the data transfer?
There's been a lot of discussion about why MLB tv ratings were down this year with most of the discussion focused on get woke, go broke. While that is certainly a part of it, I think that the herd of elephants trumpeting loudly and trampling about is being very pointedly ignored.
The Astros cheated and the only consequence to the players involved was that they won a World Series. That's it. Yes, yes, there were some punishments here and there but for the players themselves? Not a single damn thing. The lesson there? Cheating is worth it, big time.
The Astros kept that World Series even though it is indisputable that they cheated throughout the season. Why? *handwring handwring* Well, there's no proof it caused them to win the Series and we can't just go back and take it away and the integrity of the game!
I see the new hotness on the "Right" is that meh voter fraud happens every election whatchugonnado? I don't know, maybe, just spit balling here, at any time over the past 60 years any of y'all being so blase about this could have STOPPED IT YOU PATHETIC COWARDS!
You know what else you could have done, you spineless pieces of ambergris? You could have demanded that those engaging in it must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. You could have thrown your support to clearing out voter roles. You could have aided True The Vote.
Another thing you could have done? Is defending, with vigor mirroring the apathy with which you are shrugging eh it happens, those who said voter fraud is real. Funny, I don't remember seeing a single solitary one of you True Conservative Defenders Of The Base doing so.
I shall now tell a story that summarizes my response to this let us all come together in unity that is said every time a Democrat wins. I don't come across particularly well in this story, but, well, I'm not a particularly nice or good person no matter how hard my parents tried.
I attended a very small high school. How small? There were under 100 people and the school was grades 7-12. There were 13 people in my graduating class. By the by, out of those 13, 12 went to college. Of the 12 that went to college, 9 of us have graduate degrees.
The most successful one of us? The guy who barely graduated and who went off to be a plumber and who started his own plumbing business and who was a millionaire by early 30's and employs like 75 people now but that's another story.
In which I peeve everyone because I'm awesome like that. I've stopped reading whatever is going on. I don't care about the lawsuits. I don't care about the vote totals and oh these were found and tee hee hee look at our adorable volunteers forgetting to hit upload omg so cute!
No matter who wins, the result is tainted. I won't believe it if Trump wins. I won't believe it if Biden wins. I won't believe it because all of this is unbelievable. And inevitable. Systems stress to failure and the system has failed. We're talking this level of failure.
This has been decades in the making. Decades. Sure, let's start with Nixon and JFK and 1960 and WV because we have to start somewhere but it's not like vote counting shenanigans are anything new. The jokes about voting in Chicago are Borscht Belt era old.
Let's chat about this BUT BUT BUT BIDEN AND DECENCY AND THHHHHHEEEEE CCCCHIIIIILLLDDDDRRRRRREEEENNNN and whatever amount of contempt you think I have for this idiotic mouth braying you have no idea. And I'm not even talking about Biden's hair sniffing ways.
Here's what the decency DECENCY wine guzzling gossip mongering deacon's wives nice contingent means by decency: no one ever says anything that's not passive aggressive bitchy and we all pretend that there's just one way, one upper middle class way, of doing things.
Don't you dare point out anything that will upset anyone in any way. Don't you DARE say something that responds to the aggressive part of the passive aggressive. Don't you even contemplate pondering thinking about confronting someone who is an utter bitch to you. How DARE you!
Okay so here are the four responses I see to this:
1. He's lying. Possible but not probable. This statement doesn't actually make him look that good. I wanted to include the possibility of lying though. Be the most skeptical of statements supporting what you want to believe.
2. He's telling the truth and he was duped by the Biden. Possible but only sort of probable. That email is from 2017 and the statement makes clear that he knew since at least 2017 that Hunter was trading on Joe's influence. That doesn't sound like someone being duped to me.
3. He's telling the truth and he's trying to get ahead that he's known since 2017 at least that Joe Biden acted inappropriately. This is where I am leaning. It doesn't say when he was brought into Sinohawk Holdings and it doesn't way when he saw firsthand Hunter talking to Joe.
I've been offline most of today dealing with health issues and I come back to find that the NY Post, which I know, I know, how declasse, but still a major American paper, has posted a story with some Sources Say stuff but also embeds and links to the putative original materials.
And Our Betters at the various socials have lost their minds and UNVERIFIED and HOW DARE YOU and on and on and are literally pulling down posts with links to the story (why no link here) but I'm supposed to believe that there's no shenanigans with influencing the election, no sir
Pull the other one, it's got bells on it. Look, it's very fair to find it a wee bit suspicious that an unnamed shop owner had a MacBook from an unnamed person who may or may not be Hunter Biden and it's all conveniently coming out now. That's beyond fair, that's necessary.
*hauls out the tallest stepstool and, yes, the stepladder to get on it you wags* Everybody listen up! So. More things what I was pondering today and then the Hirono stupidity made my eyes bleed more and start rant time! *Hammerpants*
I keep hearing and reading about these Biden voters, mainly suburban wine moms (so what all the soccer moms are genteel drunks now? it would explain a lot), who will vote for Biden for a return to normalcy after the horribleness of the Trump years and I keep going what normalcy?
You mean the normalcy where Republicans, all of them, not just elected officials, are called racist homophobes who want to kill people and who only care about babies in the womb and whatever. You mean that normalcy? Bushitler McHaliburton! Paul Ryan pushing granny off a cliff!
This is from @jimgeraghty's column on the courts and go read that shoo. Back? Okay. I am going to rant about this bit now. The rant is about this bit, not at @jimgeraghty who nails this exactly.
Your side doesn't always win. Your side isn't supposed to always win. We live in a country of 330 million people with 697 million opinions and that's only counting my opinions. I don't always win. I shouldn't. It pains me to type that but that does not make it less true.
The point of a republic is that we elect people to represent our views to the least awful extent they can and those people are supposed to work with the people on the other side to hammer together something under which we can all live. Neither side gets everything it wants.
A decision is only as good as the information upon which it is based is so axiomatic as to be trite. It's also true. Now, there's no such thing as being able to have all information before making a decision and decisions must be made based on the best information available.
That's also axiomatic, trite, and true. We are all muddling through as best we can with what information we have and while knowing we can never know everything but we have to decide based on what we do know. Such is life. We all do it. We have to do it to get through the day.
But what happens when you can no longer trust that the information you are being given is accurate? What happens when it is impossible to evaluate if you have any, let alone the majority, of the information you need to make an informed decision? What then?
25 added to My Authors
