Late Night

Rock on.

Nerds Assemble

Convinced me.


...the troll force is strong in this one.

America's Worst Humans

Chris Christie.

Christie on refugees: "I AM concerned about widows and orphans -- the widows and orphans of my state, of September 11."

— daveweigel (@daveweigel) November 21, 2015

Minority Religion

I admit I continue to be confused by religious people who don't understand that freedom of religion is a wee bit important. I guess I blame all this on feel good Christian ecumenical stuff. Bring back the good old days when Catholics and Protestants hated each other!

I didn't have any religion growing up, and while I never self-identified as Jewish, it's probably the closest thing to a familial religious/cultural affiliation I had. A wee bit of cultural Judaism, and then Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. I'm admittedly looking back on things with a bit more understanding than I had as a child, but I lived in places where Protestants (of various denominations) were dominant and places where Catholics were. And that dominance seemed to matter, enough so that the minority (in cultural power, if not numbers) religion members didn't feel so confident about their position. The community religion has a way of seeping into schools and other institutions in minor but nontrivial ways even if the School Board isn't actively trying to bring back prayer in the schools. Cultural traditions, even mostly secular ones, aren't as universal as people think.

Visa Waivers

Hopefully Yurp "retaliates," as is the norm with visa requirements. Going to be a lot of unhappy airline executives.

One of my favorite complaints comes from Americans anguished because they need a visa to travel somewhere. Don't you know we're Americans!!!

Mass Wasting Event

Well that's creepy.

Late Night

Rock on.

9pm EST Thread

Enjoy

Have A Video

Maybe I'll Take The Afternoon Off

Because what day is it???



Stephen Colbert - Friday di mediafreaks3d

Cutting Their Way To Prosperity

Austerity keeps making the deficit worse. This is a mystery that no one understands.

It's "funny" that it doesn't matter how much the debt and deficit keep increasing. All responsible people know that austerity is the answer!

Even sensible people I know still obsess about the fact that in the late days of his administration Gordon Brown spent money on crazy things. He did! He was trying to dig holes and fill them up again. That was smarter.

The Zombie Apocalypse

Not quite but...

Bacteria becoming completely resistant to treatment - also known as the antibiotic apocalypse - could plunge medicine back into the dark ages.

Soak The Rich

Denying government benefits to rich people just makes it that much harder for less than rich people to qualify. You know, eligibility, forms, a bureaucracy to determine that eligibility, etc. The way to not give Donald Trump's kids free college involves increasing his taxes. Then give the kids "free college." Democrats really need to get rid of their obsession with means testing everything. There's a simple way to means test everything: increase taxes on rich people. It isn't welfare. It's what the government provides, to everyone, and the price of that is taxes.

We're gonna get President Trump if the Clinton campaign doesn't stop talking to itself. I'm sure they all thought this was a true zinger. It isn't. Echoes of 2008 are still there. Get better.

Late Night

Rock on.

Evening Thread

Tomorrow is...

America's Worst Humans

Bumper crop this season for some reason.

Scott Cowen.

Lindsey Gets One Right

Excuse me while I go spend some time relighting the fires in hell.

“I don’t think we should be promoting Judeo-Christian values in the Arab world,” Graham told Real Clear Politics in an interview. “I think that was the Crusades.”

Why Did They Delete Their Account

One weird and sad thing about having a lot of "internet friends" is that sometimes they just disappear. Okay mostly they are acquaintances, not friends, but they're still people you might feel a connection to, people you might have actually met in real life, and then they just drop off the grid.

Some People Are So Poor They Have To Fly Commercial

Just charter flights like the rest of us you paupers.

Internal Affairs

One trope of 80s-90s cop movies was the all powerful Internal Affairs department. They could be a force for good, getting rid of bad cops, or a force for evil, getting in the way of that lovable rogue cop who uses the smacky face when the smacky face has to be used in order to get rid of the bad guys. Whether good or evil, they were powerful. They would destroy your career.


So silly.

Nice Grift

Because people always forget, while the City of Philadelphia is not exactly a model of perfect governance, it has no control over the school district. That is run by the state, and has been for about 15 years now. William Hite should delete his account, but he won't.

Yesterday, according to Source4Teachers, the fill-rate for substitute teachers was 26 percent. That’s not far above the 11 percent of substitute positions filled when school started in September, and is about the same as late October, when Source4Teachers began increasing pay rates to lure more subs. Source4Teachers had promised to have a 75 percent fill rate by September and 90 percent by January. The fill rate last year, when the district worked with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers to find subs as it had for many years, was about 60 percent.

In September, district superintendent William R. Hite said the partnership with Source4Teachers was in jeopardy. But the district has yet to take action. Fernando Gallard, a spokesperson for the district, did not respond to multiple interview requests.

“The only thing I can think of is they are pleased with this level of failure,” said Amy Roat, a Feltonville School of Arts and Sciences teacher and member of the Caucus of Working Educators of the PFT. “I think everybody knew all summer that if you paid someone a fraction of a rate to do a difficult job you wouldn’t attract someone to do it.”

He won't even delete their account, presumably because there's enough grift to go around. Everybody wins! Except the kids today, of course. We do love our children.

(minor unnecessary disclosure: I know Amy Roat)

Late Night

Rock on.

Even More Of America's Worst Humans

Chuck Schumer.

I Can't Keep Up

The forces of political correctness have robbed good Americans of their free speech.

America's Worst Humans

David Bowers.

Cassandra

I usually hope to be wrong, but get ready for President (R) in 2017.

I'd Rather Fondle My Detachable Death Penis

Fortunately you can do that at home. Pretty sure Macon, GA, isn't a top terrorist target, but a gun fetishist can dream.

Slightly more seriously, I have no idea what the gun policies of my local theater are because I am not insane and don't care, but the corollary to that is that if I wanted to "smuggle" in a gun to my local theater I could because nobody is patting me down or running me through a metal detector? And I live in an urban hellhole! Do gun gropers actually have to worry about this stuff?

Wednesday Crass Commercialism

I get a bunch of Jeff Bezos's money even when you send gift cards!

Give me all of Jeff's moneyz. As always, don't like Amazon, don't shop there. But if you're going to shop there anyway, give me all the moneyz.

What Would You Do, Hippie???

I actually had a twitter exchange with some who runs a website that rhymes with trusinesss kinsider TrueShay on this. Britain's Corbyn is a very silly person because he's not sure that bombing people will solve the terrorist problem. This person was inspired, in the ways of twitter, to Shake His Damn Head. Silly Corbyn! Silly hippies! What would you do???

I actually have no idea. I just know that we've been bombing the shit out of everyone for 12+ years and... profit!!!

Obviously the strategy should be to kill all of the bad guys, and then there will be no more bad guys. I'm not sure why this has never occurred to us before.

"Foreign Policy"

I'm not sure which demon was tasked with getting me to sort of defend Ben Carson. He is pretty much an idiot about almost everything. But in America there is foreign policy and there is "foreign policy." The latter is a creation of the Foreign Policy Community, a production of the deep state and the State Department. It is an elaborate dance, a dictionary filled with code words, a labyrinth, a Matryoshka doll, a set of rituals dictated from above by the Council On Foreign Relations. It's how we condemn enemies with bad human rights records, and hold hands with allies who have even worse ones. It's how Russia can be good one day, and bad the next. It's how Saudi Arabia is our buddy, and Venezuela is history's greatest monster. It's how we can call Assad a reformer one day, try to get rid of him the next, and then become his buddy again. It's alchemy. It's Chinatown.

America Weeps

No President Bobby.

Overnight Thread

Enjoy

IT WAS JUST A GRIFT!!! DON'T LET OUR BOSS BE PRESIDENT!!!

Hilarious.

The conservative movement is all just a grift, from SuperPACS to whatever is Halliburton Jr. these days.

Hey, Dudes, Child Support is Real

Starting from some various premises: some anti-choice dudes have sex once in awhile, sometimes their use of birth control is imperfect, sometimes their little swimmers make it to the prize.

My pro-choice perspective isn't about preventing The Dudes from having to pay child support, but sometimes I think that they don't get that they will? Your uterus isn't about them, but they try to make it about them. I don't think they get that... it will be about them, for a lot of money, for a long time.

His TV Technique is Unstoppable

The second season of my good friend David Rees's TV Show, Going Deep, is being rolled out. I haven't watched the new ones yet, but I enjoyed the first season quite a bit. Ok, David isn't really my good friend. I think the extent of our actually meeting was him pulling over his car on some random corner in DC one day many years ago and yelling, "Hey Atrios! It's David Rees!" and I said "hi!" and we both went on our merry ways. But we're still "friends" in the way a lot of us are online friends due to the weird fucked up post-9/11/early blogging internet world we all were a part of. Our online adolescence, in a way. We connected. Get Your War On.

Mad Men

I get regular pitches from ad companies that I have never heard of. I never reply, because their pitches never offer any details and I don't have time or energy to have a long email exchange. I assume most of them are legit, or close enough, but the people in charge of reaching out to sucky bloggers like me are really horrible at it. So here's some advice that they'll never read, if they actually want people like me to bite:

1) What kind of ads?
2) How much do they pay (per click/per impression/whatever)? How much will they guarantee?
3) How long will it take me to be paid? How will I get paid?

I get a few of these every month. Include these answers in the pitch and maybe I will respond. Until then, keep giving me some of Jeff Bezos's money.

In The Beginning Were The Mushroom Clouds

For those of us who were alive at the time, the runup to the Iraq war was all about mushroom clouds and oceans don't protect us anymore and balsa wood drones of death and gotta fight them over there instead of fighting them over here and scary vials of weapons of mass destruction and we're all going to die unless we take out Saddam, basically. Magically right about the time of the invasion, before the Bush administration had even bothered to clue in their sycophantic lickspittles in the right wing media, suddenly we we were talking about spreading peeance and freeance, about democracywhiskysexy, about painting schools, and liberty. Sure before that some eventheliberalhawks pretended this was about freedom for the Kurds, or something. Remember everyone had their own personal "real reason" we're going to war in Iraq. That there were about 17 contradictory ones didn't seem to dissuade anybody.

And you might remember that the logical of humanitarianism was used to justify bombing Libya. Does anybody remember Libya? For some reason no one talks about Libya anymore. How'd that humanitarian intervention go? Good, I assume! Our freedom bombs are the freest! Even some eventheliberals who opposed the Iraq war supported that one! It was quite amazing how they adopted the mantle of dripping condescension that the Iraq war supporters sported as the latest fashion. Silly hippies, this time it'll be good! Things are bad in Libya! Our freedom bombs will help them! Why do you hate the Libyan people! We must do something!

How'd that one work out?

There are people I used to consider friends, or at least friendly acquaintances, that can piss the hell off for all I care. Not over the disagreement, but because they were assholes about it then and are and silent about it now. Oopsy! Destroyed your country! Sowwy.


Anyway, the day that people who spend most of their time advocating freedom bombing advocate spending even 20% of that cost on actual humanitarianism is the day I'll listen to them. Painting schools doesn't count.

How About We Only Let In The One True Christian

Aside from the horrible bigotry, I just get a wee bit frustrated with tribal Christians who apparently know nothing about their own religion. There are a bunch of different denominations, you see, and they agree on a lot less than one might think. Yes they mostly all have the blahblahJesusblahblah but otherwise. I suppose we can can test them at the border by determining just how angry the holiday cups from Starbucks makes them. That seems to be the true test of American Christianity these days*.

*No I am not serious. Most American Christians don't deserve to be represented by the public face of Christianity in the country, which is indeed horribly stupid.

Good Enough For Me

I'm voting Trump.

The Republican frontrunner boasted of his innate “instinct” for predicting terrorist threats, Trump told a packed crowd at Tennessee’s Knoxville Convention Center Monday night.

“In my book I predicted terrorism because I can feel it,” said Trump, who has made his billions developing casinos and hotels. “I can feel it like I feel a good location.”

Early, Early Morning Thread

Or, mid-morning, depending your time zone.

Enjoy that first cuppa!

America's Worst Humans

John Vause and Isha Sesay

Happy Hour Thread

enjoy

Placing the Right Bets

I'd bet a reasonable amount that the entire New Jersey pension fund is invested in beanie babies. All those seemingly empty transshipment buildings along 95 probably hold them.

"Despite having had many months to contract for a long-term energy supply and arrange for the necessary heat to prevent the pipes in the Revel complex from freezing, Polo North has waited until the eve of winter to concoct a temporary heating plan that both unequivocally uses ACR's equipment without authorization and threatens that equipment," the utility wrote in a court filing.

And that's not all: Bank of New York Mellon is asking a judge to order Straub's Polo North Country Club to pay $1 million in back electric bills to ACR.

Both matters will be the subject of federal court hearings on Nov. 24.

So far, Straub has sunk well over $100 million into Revel, with very little to show for it.

In case you had forgotten.

Christie’s advisers say he has tried to make the best of a very bad situation. By the time he took office in January 2010, Revel was half-built on the boardwalk, a hulking mass of steel that was losing its financing. Morgan Stanley decided to take a nearly $1 billion loss on the project rather than spending more than $1 billion more to finish the project. One option was to halt construction — leaving an unfinished project looming over a boardwalk already struggling with blight.

Instead, Christie’s administration pushed forward and found new investors by early 2011, luring them with the promise of up to $261 million in tax incentives.

Before Trigger Warnings

Back before evil censoring leftists took control of college campuses and took away all of the free speech, it was common for my various faculty acquaintances and friends in the humanities to have to try to accommodate the various delicate sensibilities of conservative religious students who believed that their religion did not allow them to read certain books and (especially) see certain films. While the degree to which any particular accommodation is "reasonable" in these circumstances is debatable, they were a regular, if not extremely frequent, type of request that faculty members had to deal with. None of this ever made the news or inspired a billion frothing think pieces about how college students were censoring us all, or about how the delicate little flowers needed their safe spaces because the kids today are weaklings. But the substance of the requests was the same: warn me about the material, let me decide what I can and can't read/watch, and find alternative assignments for me if I ask for them.

Those who bleat loudest about trigger warnings (which, whatever their merits in any particular context, have not actually taken over college syllabi, though it's fun to pretend they have) would probably be leading the charge to demonize the faculty who were teaching their precious little darlings using some of the materials they are actually using. Faculty sometimes teach using violent and pornographic films and novels, including sexual violence. And gay stuff! Lots and lots of gays stuff. Some of this would horrify those horrified by trigger warnings which they imagine are regularly applied to The Great Novels they probably never read but know are truly great because white male canon. Those also include sex and violence, but the right kind.

Forcing faculty to stamp trigger warnings on everything would just lead to the equivalent of "Warning: this syllabus may contain nuts." That's neither smart nor helpful. But having a bit of awareness that this stuff might actually be a bit shocking and, yes, traumatic to 19-year-olds who haven't ever been exposed to it, and dealing with that accordingly, is perfectly appropriate. As I said, it's nothing new. Conservative religious students have been asking for it for years.

2003 Memories

How it was.

The Great Humanitarians

At least we still have our freedom bombs to spread our love and kindness.

Snyder's office released a statement Sunday saying the state would not be accepting any Syrian refugees until the U.S. Department of Homeland Security fully reviewed its procedures.

America's Worst Humans

Suzanne Nossel.

Arab Spring

I'm so old I remember when toppling a few governments was going to spread more freedom than there had ever been freedom before, and only stupid libturds disagreed. Syria, in particular, was where the freedom was going to spread. Smell that freedom, Syria.

Who Is The Enemy

Pretty obvious, really.

A police intelligence-gathering unit tracked demonstrators and exchanged information about them with federal officials for nearly three months before getting the required approval from the department’s general counsel, according to the records, which the police released in response to a series of requests made under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.

On Aug. 14, 2014, Kathleen Lichay, an intelligence research specialist with the U.S. State Department, e-mailed Chicago Police Department officials to ask whether they had picked up any “chatter” about vigils planned in response to the fatal shooting five days earlier of Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by Darren Wilson, a white police officer in Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb. The shooting — for which a grand jury ultimately decided not to file charges — prompted protests around the nation.

Half an hour after sending the email, Lichay got a response from the Crime Prevention Information Center in Chicago, where the police collect intelligence alongside agents from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. An official there wrote back that activists were planning a rally that evening at the Daley Center.

What's All The Surveillance And Intelligence For Then

Not much confidence that the intelligence agencies can actually stop this stuff. What are we spending all that money for then?

David Cameron placed the UK on high alert for a terror attack, as holidaymakers in Paris were told to “stay indoors” and security checks were ramped up at British airports and ferry terminals.

The Prime Minister said the scale of the atrocity in France revealed “a greater ambition for mass-casualty attacks” on the West, and warned that an attempt to bring terror to the UK was “highly likely”.

Is that "pundit" highly likely (otherwise known as just making stuff up) or "I'm the Prime Minister so I actually know things" highly likely. If the latter, what do you know today that you didn't know two days ago?

What Would You Do, Hippies?

I've seen some version of this question around the internet a few times over the last couple of days, mostly from conservatives but also from "hawkish liberals." As always the point is that there are bad and violent people out there in the world, so if we're not going to blow them up and arm everybody who might be inclined to blow them up, also, too, then you got nothing, do you, hippie?

No simple cause and effect with these things, ever, but we've been blowing people up and arming other people to blow people up and toppling governments and siding with the "moderate rebels" and then siding with the new moderate rebels and then the new new moderate rebels and then sometimes reconsidering and siding with the people the new new moderate rebels were attacking because those moderate rebels suddenly didn't seem too moderate anymore. Hey, where did all of those weapons go? Better send some more! Also, too, more training.

It's horrible when a lot of people get killed. Sometimes we see that, sometimes we don't.

As for what the hippies would do? Probably not quite so much blowing up. Might not work, but the blowing up isn't working too well either.

Overnight Thread Anyone?

8:30 a.m. in Italy!