At Least It’s Friday [DOT 31/7/20]


Yesterday’s Wednesday Steel may have thrown you off, but today is definitely Friday. It’s also the last day of July. How’s your summer been? Super? Ya, me too. /s

It’s hot, it’s miserable, everyone is melting down. I counted about 16 tweets from the President yesterday. I think he was looking for some attention since all eyes were on the funeral for John Lewis.

Petty Papaya Pol Pot couldn’t be bothered to express condolences, and I’m sure Lewis’ family was grateful for his non-attendance.

Anyhow, let’s remember a guy:


“So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide.”


Remember having a President who could speak in full sentences?


The bar is so low, it’s subterranean.


If you can avoid it, I would recommend trying. Source: Mom with dementia.

Lifestyle changes could delay or prevent 40% of dementia cases – study
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jul/30/lifestyle-changes-could-delay-or-prevent-40-of-dementia-cases-study


Future historians are going to be so busy unraveling all the corruption.

How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan “Went Poof Into Thin Air”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/07/how-jared-kushners-secret-testing-plan-went-poof-into-thin-air


A 24 year old (Alexis Franklin) created this stunning digital image. Alexis is only two years younger than Breonna Taylor, who should have had so many more years and opportunities ahead of her.


Sprots!

With the words on their backs, NBA players take a stand
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/07/30/nba-social-justice-jerseys-names-messages/?arc404=true


Stonks!

The Dow and the S&P 500 ended in the red on Thursday. Investors are still wrapping their heads around the morning’s economic data including the GDP report, which finally put a number on just how badly the economy fared during the spring lockdown, as well as an increase in weekly jobless claims.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/30/investing/dow-today-us-gdp-decline/index.html

Stocks are set to jump Friday after tech giants post strong earnings, Nasdaq futures gain nearly 1%
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/30/stock-market-futures-open-to-close-news.html


Fell down a bit of a John Lewis rabbit hole on YouTube….

Have a great weekend!

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38 Comments

  1. I didn’t knew breonna taylor was alive after being shot but didn’t receive any medical attention for 20 minutes! wtf?
     

    • It’s always more horrible than you imagined.
       
      And still, no one has been charged.

      • They all wreck me (Floyd, Rice, Bland, and on and on…), but Breonna’s smiling face gets me every time.

  2. I watched Obama’s eulogy of John Lewis live. Put that in every American history museum in the country. I hope the transcript is studied for generations. He went on for over half an hour and yet, for me, time stopped. Speeches like this come along so rarely these days. I can’t remember another like it and I’m not that much younger than Obama. And the thing is I bet Obama wrote it himself. He probably practiced a little in front of Michelle and she probably had some useful insights.
     
    I know Obama was not the second coming of FDR but in retrospect 2008–2016 was like living in a Golden Age, inherited financial meltdown and all. 
     
    Happy weekend, everyone. Let’s claw our way through to November and hope for happier days ahead.

    • I sometimes forget what a masterful orator Obama is. The man can seriously deliver a speech. But the last 736 years (give or take) since Trump’s election have dulled my memories (alcohol probably helped with that) and it was so nice to be reminded. Hell, even GW seemed competent and presidential. Jesus, we’ve fallen so far.
       
      My reaction was the same as Meg’s. I told my wife, “Remember what it was like to have a President who can speak in complete sentences?”

      • I was writing something for school and I watched his speech at the 2004 DNC and I was so damn moved and uplifted. The same from his speech against McCain at the 2008 DNC.
         
        I still don’t get why more people don’t at least attempt to replicate the way he speaks; I’ve only seen Julian Castro attempt to speak in the same way, linking big, foundational ideas with smaller, more personal stories, providing examples, citing history in a way that isn’t boring, peppering his stuff with humor and heartbreak. Gotdamn, he’s a masterful orator.
        Which makes it all the more frustrating that he was consistently critiqued for sounding too “professorial”, which always came off as a coded way for the media to say he sounded too uppity. These days we’re cheering if the President can manage to string two sentences.

        • It’s definitely code for “uppity.” I also can’t understand why people want a president that they can “have a beer with.” No, I prefer that my presidents know. their. shit. Beer drinking’s not even in the top 100 attributes I look for in a president. 

          • There’s no greater lie than “I want a President who seems like me”. I don’t want a President who is like me. I’m a neurotic nutcase who rants about football on the internet, an anxiety riddled mess who is only now starting to come to grips with my disease and going to therapy. While I like knowing my President has something like a heart, I do NOT want one who I could “drink a beer with”, and even if I did, I’d want him to have better taste in beer than I do.
             
            I’m not offended by the idea that a President is smarter than me. He should be smarter than me, or he at least should be smart enough to know he should hire people who are smarter than him.

          • As a homebrewer, it was cool that he was the first president to brew in the white house.  That and the fact he used to smoke pot on the same water tower as me on Tantalus kind of endeared me to him a little more.
             
            https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-barack-obama-became-first-president-brew-beer-white-house-180964016/
             
            https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/05/obama-and-his-pot-smoking-choom-gang

          • “I also can’t understand why people want a president that they can “have a beer with.” ”
            HARD SAME!!
            That’s been a thing I haven’t *gotten* since W was in office, and folks were starting to bandy it about on occasion.
            I KNOW all the regulars in the local bar… and while yes many of them are some really great people… frankly, NO, I don’t want the lives of 350 million+ people in their hands.
            And the others there who are Assholes,but “still someone you could have a beer with”?
            NO WAY IN HELL do you ever wanna put power of that sort into the hands of a person like them!
            want someone who has at least a modicum of understanding about history, someone who ideally has studied (or at least has an understanding of!) Constitutional Law… someone who is on average calm & doesn’t fly off the handle regularly in their personal & work lives, and someone who has proven they have the ability to learn** AND use critical thinking skills.🤨
             
            **mind you, this has NOTHING to do with an ability/inability to garner oneself college degrees & certifications!!
            There are smart people with college degrees, BUT DonnyDumbass *also* likes to point out his own college degree….
            One can pass many colleges’ & universities’ programs with a C average… and from personal experience in my own trips through college, I can say that it IS entirely possible to pass certain professors’ classes, without *ever* needing to actually learn the information presented–one just has to be able to look shit up, regurgitate enough of it to pass some tests/write a paper about it, and then move on, forgetting that info…

        • The machinery of the press hates serious speeches. Absolutely hates them.
           
          They want talking points and applause lines for ten second video and audio clips, headlines, and now hyperlinks and tweets. Big speeches with stories, evidence and a train of logic just gums up the gears for them.
           
          It means they need smart analysts who can say something more insightful than “change of tone.” And it means they have to break out of the fake neutrality and balance framework they lock themselves into. Anyone could see the contrast between Obama and Trump but the media refuses to say it, because to them obvious reporting is now unfair partisanship.

          • Of course, if you talk to my neighbor, you would hear that “the media” is nothing but completely in the tank for Democrats and never criticizes them in any way.

            • The media agrees with your neighbor that they’re not hard enough on Democrats, which is why they always try to both sides on issues.
               
              Of course, that means that media criticism always aligns with the right — criticism of health care always takes the side of expanding it is bad and costs too much, instead of asking why a Democratic plan doesn’t cover more people and get rid of hoops people have to jump through. Coverage of miltary spending always focuses on supposed threats Democrats are ignoring, instead of asking if Democrats ahould be making deeper cuts.

    • Now try putting yourself into the head of the miserable, hateful creature that despises Obama and reveres Trump.  I wouldn’t want to stay there for more than 2 minutes, and I’m not the most pleasant person myself.

    • Did you see the thing where she was sued for wrongful death because the woman had a broken off needle in her arm? Total quack.

      • She sounds less “endearingly quirky” and more full-blown psychotic.

  3. The Epstein document dump is bad for Alan Dershowitz:
     
    https://jezebel.com/this-ghislaine-maxwell-document-drop-is-pretty-damning-1844567445
     
    He made a big howl earlier about saying he only went to the Epstein island with his wife, and now it is obvious he was trying to distract from the horrible Epstein stuff he was, alledgedly, doing off the island.
     
    I am curious whether the NY Times is going to run six different articles and think pieces about how awful it is that people on Martha’s Vineyard are snubbing Dershowitz, like they did two years ago. Funny how back then he was all about promoting civil conversations. I’m really curious how many of these guys complaining about the lack of civility are just Metoo abusers.
     
    https://www.vox.com/2018/7/12/17562386/alan-dershowitz-marthas-vineyard-trump

    • …remember when you used hear about people retiring in disgrace…at the time I tended to think it cropped up around shameful stuff & that was a shame…but now that we see what the shameless version looks like honestly I’m increasingly nostalgic?

    • Naturally, the part of this that none of these dumb fucks remotely considered is that viruses don’t give a shit if you’re a Republican or a Democrat. The blue states that locked down early, with the exception of California, are all seeing relatively steady numbers or minor increases. The red states that rushed to reopen are FUBAR, and they have chickenshit governors unwilling to do with what need to happen to contain it.
       
      If the plan was to cull the herd in blue states, that shit backfired like a motherfucker. 

  4. Ages ago, in the before times, I know I made an anxiety-riddled sardonic joke about how cathartic it would be if someone made a virus that only targeted the idiots that keep supporting Fanta Twitler and his ghouls. 
     
    So yeah. Didn’t expect that plot twist to be real. So if the writers are reading this comment, can someone adjust my plot line so that I’m marginally wealthy? Actually, fuck that. I’d rather be poor and have universal health care for everyone else. 

    • I dunno, “America finally realizes it needs universal healthcare more than it needs the ‘right’ to choose how shitty their insurance should be” would be a helluva plot twist to end this season.
       
      Myopic, Splinter, Meg, Clever, you think we can workshop this into something film-able, or should we keep writing the plot to The American Story like its Walking Dead Season 12 and have our fans wonder why all these miserable people haven’t just died yet?

      • …be nice to give that plot twist a whirl, certainly…I think that walking dead analogy is a little too good to be entirely comfortable

        …back when the sopranos was on there was a whole run where every episode you were like “ok so at this point that guy’s dead, right?” & each time he made it to the credits alive while being every bit the god-awful liability he obviously was…& feels a lot like trump & the thinking that fuels him channels that plot line pretty hard

    • I’m currently trying to teach the puppy that I refuse to call mine (because that would mean I have to pay for its insurance) how to fetch. She keeps almost understanding the point of the game, but like…I’ll throw a stick, and then she’ll look at me funny, and then I go “go get the stick!”, and she’ll b-line right to the stick…and then past it. Or she’ll find another stick. And then she’ll look at me weird when I ask her to bring it back.
       
      I think I’ll graduate to a tennis ball when she eventually realizes that the point of the game is to actually bring back the thing I’m throwing.

      • Peanut butter is my cheat code for dog training which I use shamelessly and without apology.

      • …fetch is harder than it looks…I had relatives with a sweet-as-anything pit bull years ago that had no concept of there being an end point to the cycle

        …& at least one terrier who thinks the game is actually I-have-ball-you-can’t-get & would prefer to play tug of war with an object almost entirely within their jaws

        …but when it works it’s evergreen…& “most” dogs seem to get the sequence?

        • There is another version of this game,too, where the dog (a certain Labrador,who shall remain nameless…😉) will HAPPILY go after the ball, and fetch it, if there is *another* dog, from which they may steal the ball away… 
          But when you try to play fetch with just *her,* she will happily run *to* said ball after it’s thrown, sniff it, look at the ball, then just stand there, looking at *you* tongue out and wagging her tail…
          Until you start walking over to get the ball, wherein she decides to pick up said ball, walk 10-15 yards away, and then proceed to flop to the grass & chomp on same, until the tennis ball splits & breaks into pieces within it’s felted coating, *or* she manages to pop the racket ball and tear it into large blue rubber-confetti…
          🤣
          I love her, and she’s my heart. But if there *isn’t* another dog for her to resource-guard against, she WILL NOT fetch!😆
           

          • I’m also familiar with that game!

      • My dog fetches when, and only when she feels like it. It’s her world, I’m only living in it because she doesn’t have opposable thumbs and can’t get her own food open.

        • We have had 4 cockapoos at different points in my life and they all had strange ways of playing ball.  In childhood, we had a brother and sister and they would play infield and outfield.  The male would chase the ball when you threw it and drop it for his sister to bring to you, he would never think of bringing it to you. 
          My last cockapoo would only bring you back the ball if you threw it to him in a small space.  When I really wanted to wear him out I would throw it in our cul-de-sac and he wanted you to bounce it of the road so he could catch in the air.  He would then run towards you then detour up the neighbors hill and lay down with ball in his mouth.  I would yell at him to bring it but he would just watch until he thought I was going to give up.  He would then drop the ball and push it with his nose to roll it down the hill to me.  Little bastard tried to make me fetch the ball all the time and then would bark at me until I would throw it again to start this whole process again.  He knew exactly what he could get away with more than any other dog I have ever seen.

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