Dogged Days [DOT 1/8/22]

1/8/22 MegMegMcGee 25

Can you guys believe it is AUGUST. I cannot.

Today, in Marjorie Nazi Greene tweets:

Damn, it wasn’t me.

Someone in Illinois won the $1.337 billion Mega Millions jackpot—the third-largest lottery prize in U.S. history
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/31/illinois-mega-millions-winner-third-largest-us-lottery-jackpot-ever.html

Ew. Also, we’re fucked.

Lake Mead: shrinking waters uncover buried secrets and grisly finds
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/31/lake-mead-nevada-water-level-drought

Stonks!

Google CEO tells employees productivity and focus must improve, launches ‘Simplicity Sprint’ to gather employee feedback on efficiency
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/31/google-ceo-to-employees-productivity-and-focus-must-improve.html

Sprots!

Bill Russell, NBA superstar and civil rights activist, dies aged 88
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/jul/31/bill-russell-dead-boston-celtics-obituary

More in RIP news…

Nichelle Nichols, trailblazing ‘Star Trek’ actress, dies at 89
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/31/entertainment/nichelle-nichols-star-trek-dies/index.html

And I thought this was her… Sad.

‘Star Trek’ icon Nichelle Nichols embroiled in elder abuse lawsuit
https://nypost.com/2020/08/21/star-trek-icon-nichelle-nichols-embroiled-in-elder-abuse-lawsuit/

Today, in Turtle News:

Have a happy Monday!

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25 Comments

  1. Finally made it home from spur of the moment casino trip.  In the time it took me to lose three hundred bucks, my friend won 3 thousand.  Realizing the house wins eventually, he wisely took the money and ran before the casino could get the rest.

    Losing sucks, but it reminds why I don’t go gambling often and why I should stay far away from any fucking casino.  Period.  On the other hand it seems everyone I’ve gambling with wins so I’m a good luck charm to everyone but myself.

    Otherwise a quiet celebration for my friend.  No Hunter S. Thompson weirdness though.

    Also suffered the limitations of my electric car (a Nissan Leaf.)  I had to recharge several times on the way there and back.  Good thing I was experienced in finding charging stations or I’d still be there as there are huge gaps in coverage (there are still some parts of the Golden Horseshoe (includes the Greater Toronto Area) that can be considered rural.) I’m pretty sure that my next EV will have more range…

    Something anyone considering an EV should think about.

    Now off to sleep.

    • Yes, I’ve read some scary articles about the lack of recharging stations. One detailed a trip from NYC to Philadelphia (if memory serves). The guy mapped out his route including recharging stations, only to find that several were broken or vandalized and hadn’t been repaired. I remember him detailing one incident where, in sheer desperation, he had to sit at an empty sports arena in the dark, recharging his car. Most big sports venues tend to not be in upscale neighborhoods.

      I am reading more about auxiliary batteries as an alternative to generators here in Florida. They can run a couple of appliances for a day or two on a single charge. I’m wondering when that will be adapted to cars — keep one in your trunk for emergencies. Of course, that adds weight, so the payoff might not be worth it at this point.

    • My wife and I went to a casino once, on the time I could blink, I lost 40, she won 90, so I stopped and watched her, a lot more fun

      • I read a definition of Republicans once: Republicans don’t want anyone telling them what to do, Republicans want to tell everyone else what to do.

        Everything they embrace, whether it’s Constitutional originalism, religion, climate change denialism, or trickle-down economics, is based on that single principle. Anything they espouse is a tool intended to give them the power to tell others what to do. It’s pretty simple when you break it down that way.

  2. Sheldon does that same wiggle in front of the output hose on his tank’s filter. He’s already submerged to reach it, so I don’t really think it’s a bidet thing. Must just feel good to him.

    • …truly the forces of right wing fuckery are vastly & legion…but I don’t know which sounds worse in the way of risks…that they might actually have the wherewithal to follow a course intentionally over successive generations…or that they can get so much of what they want out of the thing even if it never gets beyond one of several potentially “failed” end-points

      …that kind of failure-state-redundancy planning seems pretty dire…not least since I’m pretty sure I can’t think of an equivalent…lets call it an “equal & opposite reaction”?

    • One of our options is to save and save (not via bitcoins and NFTs, as we now know) and leave the country. Apparently we won’t get a warm reception in Mexico City:

      https://nypost.com/2022/07/28/mexico-city-residents-angered-by-influx-of-americans-speaking-english-gentrifying-area-report/

      which is deeply ironic because I would assume more Mexicans move into the US every day than Americans move to the DF (Mexico City) in a year, but I suppose it’s all relative. I have non-Mexican friends now happily living in Mexico but they’re all writers and other kinds of creative sorts so they really don’t need to be in their birthplace, the US. They are not ugly Americans, though, and have all learned Spanish. It is fun for me, also a non-native speaker of Spanish, to speak Spanish with them, and they like to tell me all the latest profanities, which I won’t repeat here, since this is a family-oriented website.

      I will pass along this, though, which one of these Mexico-dwelling American friends passed along to me a while ago:

      https://theconversation.com/how-mexican-advertising-featuring-rich-white-people-perpetuates-racism-and-classism-106655

      Why and how a white person named Carl W. Jones has been working in Mexican advertising for 25 years was the real mystery, as was his affiliation with some made up “university” called The University of Westminster. I think this is a spoof and he was just too cowardly to claim that he was Senior Lecturer, Hogwarts Academy.

      I will say, though, that when we went to Mexico City (we were with Cortés in 1519, or at least that’s what it feels like) I became obsessed with a popular telenovela called “Acapulco” that was showing in reruns. This featured a very sexy cast having sex with each other, mostly their own in-laws and business rivals, and none of them looked like the Mexicans you’d squeeze in with while taking the subway.

  6. We also lost Pat Caroll, who for those of us that grew up in the latter part of Gen-X & the early part of the Millenials, was best known as the voice behind one of Disney’s most iconic baddies;

    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/obit-pat-carroll-voice-ursula_n_62e7aad7e4b0d0ea9b78d5f2

    https://giphy.com/gifs/disney-the-little-mermaid-ursula-iFjp2GQYKBleg

    https://giphy.com/gifs/disney-ursula-pathetic-e5tZX35GNAyxa

    https://giphy.com/gifs/ursula-nOlXPa0ZZIpnW

    https://giphy.com/gifs/poor-souls-ursula-gm5zifRTBmiKk

     

    • If you’re a little older and watched TV as a small child in a largely unsupervised family in the 70s you might also remember Pat Carroll from game show appearances and sitcom reruns. Here she is in the extremely ill-advised early 70s revival of “What’s My Line.”

      I’m almost positive she was a regular on “Hollywood Squares” and used to tell obscene (bleeped out for TV but you knew what she was saying) jokes at Friars Club roasts but I can’t find evidence of this. Maybe I’m having recovered memories.

  7. Filed in the NY Times were the latest in its interminable series “Mistakes Were Mistaked, Discourse Was Discoursed.”

    Long were the pieces published on failures made in renewable energy investment and regressive fees and fines in Alabama:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/27/opinion/environment/energy-crisis-oil-gas-fracking.html

    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/27/opinion/alabama-fines-fees.html

    And yet mention not was made of parties or politics. Things that were bad just were happened.

    But enough of the passive voice. The Alabama article does mention a political party’s agenda once, to be fair. The Democrats. In 1872.

    It’s one more sign that the Times and the American elite are institutionally biased against assigning any responsibility to the GOP for the worst abuses.

    One of the long running complaints in both news and opinion pieces in the Times is about “polarization” of parties. But the bias of the Times is so strong that when the difference between two parties becomes starker over the years — GOP climate denial, GOP anti tax demogoguery — signs of polarization vanish. The effect of the lockstep radicalism of the GOP must be erased and whatever is left becomes the problem that can be discussed. And inevitably with their discourse it’s the Left that is the problem.

    Because subtractions must be made before blame is assigned.

    • …they might be high on the list of sinners claiming to be sinned against…but they did also run this the other day

      Today, two-thirds of American oil and even more of its gas comes from hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking, which has played this heroic-seeming role before, in the country’s long effort post-9/11 to get out from the grip of Middle Eastern producers and secure what is often described as “energy independence.” (Donald Trump preferred the term “energy dominance.”) It hasn’t proved quite as useful as you might think: Because energy prices are set on global markets, domestic production doesn’t mean Americans pay less at the pump. But thanks in large part to fracking, the United States has become the world’s largest producer of both oil and gas.

      Perhaps the most striking fact about the American hydraulic-fracturing boom, though, is unknown to all but the most discriminating consumers of energy news: Fracking has been, for nearly all of its history, a money-losing boondoggle, profitable only recently, after being propped up by so much investment from venture capital and Wall Street that it resembled less an efficient-markets no-brainer and more a speculative empire of bubbles like Uber and WeWork. The American shale revolution did bring the country “energy independence,” whatever that has been worth, and more abundant oil and gas. It has indeed reshaped the entire geopolitical landscape for fuel, though not enough to strip leverage from Vladimir Putin. But the revolution wasn’t primarily a result of some market-busting breakthrough or an engineering innovation that allowed the industry to print cash. From the start, the cash moved in the other direction; the revolution happened only because enormous sums of money were poured into the project of making it happen.
      […]
      Clean energy has found its footing anyway, but renewables still account for only 12 percent of energy consumption in the United States, compared with 32 percent for natural gas and 36 percent for petroleum. Imagine what those figures might look like if there had been a decade of strategic subsidy and directed regulatory support of the kind that, in recent weeks, has been taken off the table by Senator Joe Manchin, who spiked President Biden’s compromise energy bill, and by the Supreme Court’s limiting of the power of federal energy regulation in West Virginia v. E.P.A.
      […]
      These advances have come despite, not because of, the major oil and gas companies, which are currently contributing less than 5 percent of all investment into clean tech — even as their net income, according to the International Energy Agency, is projected to more than double in 2022 to a staggering $4 trillion. And the United States too is sitting largely on the sidelines: For example, in 2004 the country sold 13 percent of all photovoltaic cells worldwide, but in 2021 that figure had fallen to less than 1 percent, even as China’s share has grown to nearly 80 percent now. Assessing overall clean-energy investment, the I.E.A. tellingly breaks up its numbers into three “regions”: first, “advanced economies,” which includes the United States and Europe; second, “emerging markets and developing economies”; and third, China, all on its own, getting its own bar in the three-bar graph and spending far more than either Europe or the United States individually. America should try to do something about that disparity — perhaps by taking a broader view of what qualifies, on a perilously warming planet, as a worthwhile investment.
      https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/27/opinion/environment/energy-crisis-oil-gas-fracking.html

      …so at the risk of sounding like I’m defending the indefensible…when there’s this much blame to go around I can see it being genuinely impractical to try to assign all of it each & every time the subject comes up

      …I’d be up for a better ratio of knocking-it-out-the-park to the swing-&-a-miss routine though, either way?

      • Yes, that’s the piece I cited in a different format — and the core problem is that they posit a resistance to investment in renewables that just happened in some kind of vacuum.

        In this crazy perspective, there is no lobbying. There are no Koch brothers. There is no Murdoch.

        There literally is no Republican Party. Government investment simply isn’t made, votes aren’t taken. Why? For the Times, it’s an unknowable mystery.

        They’ve created a vision of the government where the GOP simply doesn’t exist.

        The reason for the erasure is so that they can turn it into a both sides issue. If you can’t mention the Kochs, you can’t mention Massey Energy, you can’t mention the money Exxon-Mobil has overwhelmingly thrown into fighting renewables, you can’t mention the Federalist Society pushing for crazy anti-regulatory courts, then all you are left with is blame to be parcelled out on an equal basis to the left.

        It’s a fundamental baselining error. It’s the equivalent of watching a pedestrian get hit by a car running a light, get up and stagger in front of the car in a concussed state as the light turns, get hit by the car a second time, and then argue that everything before the second impact should be off the table and only look at the second impact.

        There’s an argument for baselining for minor points. But acting as if Koch, Mobil and Murdoch literally don’t exist in the policy world in an article about the policy world is not some minor point. It’s a categorical error. And it’s something the Times does every single day.

    • Did I ever mention why I stopped regularly reading The New York Times? It’s not particularly interesting now but I’m bored and under deadline and I like to slack off so I’ll tell you.

      Way back in 1992 I, a member of the Democratic wing of the Democratic party, as Harry Truman memorably described himself, was a Jerry Brown supporter. He was one of the few who decided to go up against extremely popular Gulf War I hero George H. W. Bush and competed to be the Democratic nominee for President. It was the first time I ever really became active in politics. I called the 800 number and gave donations (that was very innovative of former and future Governor Brown) and phone banked for him and pestered my friends and neighbors and coworkers, pretty much everything I could get away with.

      The Times‘s coverage of Brown was absolutely horrendous. At first he was dismissed (like AOC was; her first mention in the Times was when she unexpectedly won her primary against Democratic machine hack/Nan Pelosi chum Joe Crowley) but then it took a vicious turn. Brown kind of famously had never married, although he has been linked to different women, including Linda Ronstadt, and did eventually marry someone but I can’t remember her name. The Times, which was very homophobic at the time, insinuated a relationship between him and his campaign manager, who was also unmarried. The campaign manager, whose name I have forgotten, was vaguely foreign, French I think, and was treated to snarky profile in the Living section where, we learned, horrors, that he lived in a studio apartment among Black people and slept on a futon and practiced TM. I should really look for that article and I’m sure it’s been archived somewhere.

      In the course of my advocacy for Jerry Brown I almost lost Better Half (he liked Ross Perot and if you knew him this wouldn’t surprise you) and many of my friends, who followed along and liked Bill Clinton for his third way Republican-lite electability. So, a way to vote Republican but able to hold your head up among your notionally liberal Democratic friends.

      Time passed and I still picked up the Times on Sunday to read the Weddings section (now called Vows, because they’re allowing gay weddings but they don’t really believe gay people can or should be married) and to read the rantings of the superannuated Opinion columnists. I had to have something to talk to my coworkers about the next day, a Monday, didn’t I? Then, with the internet, I just gave up.

      In its infancy the legacy media created all sorts of strange online portals so I took to reading The Washington Post, which was free to all up until about a decade ago. And The Boston Globe, which had the foresight to trademark boston.com, which was amazing but kind of sad, because the Boston area is fairly tech-heavy and to this day the entire city is branded in a way under the umbrella of an ever-increasingly-ridiculous—well, both the Post and the Globe are now behind paywalls, and to read the Times and the Post I have to use Better Half’s corporate subscriptions.

      I once asked him why he didn’t have a corporate subscription to the Globe, he being a Boston native and all, and he told me that his Silicon Valley-based company didn’t even subscribe to the San Francisco paper(s? I think there might be more than one, but I think they’re both owned by the same conglomerate, the Chronicle and the Examiner) because they’re worthless and if they subscribed to the Globe, what next? The Pennysaver from a small town in Mississippi? I saw his point.

      I hope someone’s as bored and work-shy as I am this fine Monday morning…

  11. Oh well a 6 game suspension seems fine for accusations of sexual assault and misconduct with 24 women. Sure, Cleveland Browns.

    I mean his $45 million signing bonus isn’t impacted. Nor his $1.035 million base salary, but I’m sure that $345k income loss is really gonna send the message that the NFL takes these sorts of things seriously…

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