Month: November 2018

 
From Glenn R. Geist at MadMikesAmerica:

Florida. . . look, you’re already rolling your eyes in expectation, but no, this isn’t another expose on political corruption or public stupidity, it’s about crimes against English. Maybe it’s about crimes against reality too.

For at least a hundred years, the real estate business has defined Florida to what may be a unique degree and that “industry” if I can call it that has had a history of misrepresentation that some might call fraud although some of what might have been swampland proved to be quite profitable to those who hung on to their underwater and snake-infested plots of land now called Delray Beach or Boca Raton. Still, most of the buyers in the 1920s and later were eager to fall for the poetic nomenclature and fake stories about Spanish pirates and treasure and old maps and faux Spanish architecture.

Realtors, as they’re now called have long led the pack in dressing up the merchandise with creative English. They still do it and we still seem to fall for it. I live on the coast, like most Floridians, but I notice that the farther inland you go, the more you’ll find place names including nautical terms: cove, point, bay, etc. There’s a huge retirement living project being built near me called “Canopy Cove” Several miles inland, there are no nearby coves and having been clear-cut, hardly any canopy. Across the highway, there’s “Lost Lake” which is Realtor-speak for “Drained Swamp.”

But these things aren’t my complaint du jour.

– More –
 

 
From The Journal of Improbable Research:

If you want to understand burnt food—understand it better than most humans have managed to—this study by Nikolopoulos and Tzanetis is a good source of insight:

“TIME-ESTIMATES OF BURNT FOOD FOR A NONLOCAL REACTIVE-CONVECTIVE PROBLEM FROM THE FOOD INDUSTRY,” by C.V. Nikolopoulos and D.E. Tzanetis, Advances in Scattering and Biomedical Engineering, 2004, pp. 355-362.

For a less theoretical exploration, the place to go is (we remind you) The Museum of Burnt Food.

– More –
 

 
From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

What is it that gives “great meaning” to the lives of Americans? There are some — those who want to convince you that the United States is a christian country — that would have you believe religion is the thing that gives people meaning in their lives. But that is simply not the case.

The Pew Research Center asked Americans what gave them meaning in their lives, and religion did not finish well.

– More –
 

 
From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

Let’s pretend for a moment that we are an amoral, moronic president (Hi Donnie!) and by law, we are required to release a report on climate change that damns one of our key policies to hell. When do we release it?

Black Friday, silly! You know, the day after Thanksgiving when everyone—who is not buying their way into debt—is sitting in a Cheesecake Factory-like torpor from eating too much. Death, where is thy jolly old sting?

– More –
 

 
From News Corpse:

Whereupon, Payne interrupted Stockman and diverted him from a discussion about how badly Trump is managing the economy to some absurd speculations about an imaginary war between the U.S. and China. Clearly Payne wasn’t going to allow Stockman to educate the willfully ignorant Fox News audience about Trump’s foolish economic agenda. Payne thought it would be better to fear monger about a war that no sane analyst is predicting. And it went downhill from there:

Payne: It’s kinda harsh for you to call President Trump a madman.
Stockman: Oh, absolutely he is.
Payne: Because he’s fighting back against unfair trade, intellectual property theft, a country that’s building man-made militarized islands […] You don’t think that we should be pushing back against China?
Stockman: No. China is not a threat to us whatsoever. If they want to waste their money on sandcastles in the South China Sea, be our guest. […] China’s economy is a house of cards. They’ve got forty trillion of debt. It is the biggest speculative building spree in history. Without our export markets, without 4,000 Walmarts and everything else in America, their economy would collapse. They don’t dare threaten us.

So Payne successfully sidetracked the conversation from Stockman’s initial commentary that Trump is a “madman” who is “out to lunch” with regard to the economy. But only to get walloped by Stockman’s astute insight into the weakness of China’s position in relation to the U.S.

– More –
 

 

Parallels in history are not hard to find with my President. The third emperor of ancient Rome used at least one remarkably similar military tactic.

Continue reading “American Troops Gathering Seashells by the Seashore”

• This week’s note in Trumpian ‘Alternative Facts’ comes from Slate as Dahlia Lithwick discovers a venue in which Trump distortions of reality don’t seem to work.
   
• Let’s not forget Stacey Abrams of Georgia who came within a hair of becoming the first black woman Governor of a southern state. She lost only because of a vigorous anti-voter suppression campaign that did not stop at any pretext short of murder. Infidel753 bring us the most inspirational non-concession speech in American history. Constructive defiance.
   
• It is Trump, but not just Trump. At The Moderate Voice, David Robertson finds a prominent conservative who not only acknowledges that racism exists, but recognizes it as a conservative problem conservatives should confront.
   
• Andy Borowitz reports as President Trump refuses to pardon the White House turkey, accusing it of spying for billionaire George Soros.
   
• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors carries a summary. President Trump’s trade war has cut off China from American soybeans. So American farmers are selling to South American countries at estate-sale-everything-must-go discounts. And those countries are using those new imports to replace the crops they would have been using domestically. You see, their own soybeans are not available because they are all being shipped to China. So Chinese consumers are happy. South American farmers are happy. US farmers are pretty much screwed. My president promised a bailout but now the election is over. The bailout is being slow walked. Well, slow-crawled, actually. Did I mention what is being done to US farmers?
   
• MadMikesAmerica brings news of a Republican anti-abortion bill in Ohio that, if strictly followed, could bring the death penalty to women who obtain abortions.
   
• Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara argues that the 2008 economic meltdown was actually caused by too much government regulation. Seems a bit counter-intuitive. Perhaps more than a bit counter-factual? You know. Kind of completely wrong.
   
• PZ Myers argues that scientific skepticism is often at its best when it is directed at science, and applies that insight to genetics. Shortened message is that good science is a perpetual search for better science.
   
• The deadly incident was around the corner from where I had worked until our office was recently moved. A maniac terrorized three women then killed one as she refused to give in, at gunpoint, to his sexual demands. Turns out he is well known south of St. Louis as an anti-gun regulation activist and the former pastor of an evangelical Christian church.
   

 
via The Moderate Voice:

To avoid any ambiguity, President Trump will be releasing a price guide of what crimes other countries can get away with and for what cost. Sneak preview: your tenth murder of a journalist is free!

— MAD Magazine (@MADmagazine) November 21, 2018

 

 
From nojo:

Many long national nightmares later, we have yet to escape this one, probably won’t for a couple years. But the days of utter hopelessness, the days of one elected branch of our government colluding with another to divest our republic of its sovereignty and our citizens of their liberty are coming to an end.

Nixon faced a House and Senate run by Democrats. Trump hasn’t had the pleasure of either.

We’re not there yet, and we’ve been worrying about what shenanigans might be pulled in the waning days of the 115th Congress, but the lame-duck session has yet to bear casualties. Meanwhile, Democrats are already squabbling over their incoming leadership, and—

Well, it’s refreshing, really. Familiar. Nice and messy, the way it was before the storm hit.

Politics as usual.

The problems laid bare over the past two years remain, of course — not just the traitors holding high offices, but the illegitimacy of those offices themselves, the very structure of our national government as a perversion of the consent of the governed. The ferocity of those who hold power to deny their own citizens the right to veto that power.

And, well, the citizens themselves, some 40 percent of them, more or less, the White Tribe that is the only tribe that matters in America.

– More –
 

 
From Dave Dubya:

Our First Amendment right to free speech is being reduced to the right of corporations and the wealthy to unlimited speech and influence. We the people need to speak out. Voting is our most important political speech.

Let us be thankful for what representation we have remaining, but we should also know this may not last either. We use it or lose it.

Our founding document, the Declaration of Independence tells us:

“That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.”

How’s that been working out? More Americans voted for Democratic senators, yet the Republicans hold the Senate. Only an amendment to the Constitution can remedy this inequality.

Democracy is being suppressed across the states as well.

In the state houses of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and North Carolina Democrats got more votes than Republicans. Republicans still control them. Voters in Michigan have had enough, and passed a ballot proposal to end partisan gerrymandering. The sooner the rest of the country follows this example the better.

The time has come to draw the line and speak the clear truth that few dare to utter.

– More –