According to the back end of this website, this is my 900th post on Deadsplinter! Thanks for sticking around!
Those poor parents
Uvalde school massacre could have been stopped sooner, DOJ report finds
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/18/us/attorney-general-garland-uvalde-victims-thursday/index.html
Ew.
Democrat in contact with FBI after Roger Stone’s alleged death threat
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/18/roger-stone-death-threats-jerry-nadler-fbi-trump
I’m on my way to Florida tomorrow but I don’t even think that will help!
Another wave of bitter Arctic cold is blasting south across the U.S.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/01/18/cold-weather-temperatures-forecast-central-southern-us/
Sprots!
Hollywood stunt driver Sara Price is first US woman to win Dakar Rally stage
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/jan/18/hollwood-stunt-driver-sara-price-is-first-us-woman-to-win-dakar-rally-stage
Jeremy Update:
Have a great weekend!
Have fun in Florida!
Jeremy, in close up, really does look like something from Jurassic Park.
In last night’s episode of “Hawaii 5-0” we’re mostly focused on my boyfriend Danno. He’s bowling with a buddy of his, a fellow cop, who we’ve never seen before, and won’t see again because he gets killed in the first five minutes. Of course I thought of the book Bowling Alone, about how unsociable we’ve become over the years, and it only gets worse years after year.
Maybe it was this distraction but suddenly we’re in a pharmacy or convenience store that’s being held up. The gunman is wearing a mask. Danno somehow knows who this is, or thinks he does, so he tracks the guy down and takes a shot at him.
Now we go to the other star of the show, the hospital, where we’ve already been many times. Danno’s victim is lingering near death, so they have an oxygen mask strapped to his face and do manual compression on his heart when the monitor starts flatlining. Turns out that Danno got him in the spine and he’s probably going to be paralyzed for life. And, there’s no real evidence that he was really the criminal, so it’s a media circus.
Finally, in the last 10 or 15 minutes or so Steve McGarrett finally shows up (he was probably doing “Match Game 1973” or “The $10,000 Pyramid” or something) and figures out that the guy’s older brother framed him. The older brother has so much hair. When he realizes, in the hospital, that the 5-0 is on to his con, he makes a run for it, but Komo’s replacement, Ben, has just gotten off the elevator and intercepts him and picks him up! He’s not a small guy, he’s probably about 6 feet, and the hair alone probably weighed 20 pounds.
Thrilling.
Oh, and as per norm, we watch these 5-0 episodes while eating dinner. Last night I made rigatoni in a creamy tomato sauce with a little tomato and avocado salad on the side, and then for dessert I warmed up store-bought brownies and topped them with a really rich vanilla ice cream that BH found somewhere. I’ll have to find it and remember it. Since none of this is really fit for canine consumption I rollated over and got a few crackers for him. I was going to top them with this smoked Gouda we have, but BH put his foot down. I don’t know what his problem is. All the vets recommend hiding pills in cheese to get dogs to consume them.
Treats are marketed for owners, of course. Every dog I’ve know has reacted the same to a chunk of stale bread as the fanciest piece of human food. On a scale of 1-10, only lettuce doesn’t rate an 11, and even a piece of dropped plain iceberg gets a lick and a chew.
case in point…
Huskies are among the craziest of all the breeds. But leash six of them up and mush them in your sleigh and you’re good to go!
One of Faithful Hound’s best friends is a male husky. They like to do this Cirque du Soleil-like routine where they leap over each other’s backs, meanwhile being leashed, so the owners join in on the ballet.
little village i grew up in had an annual husky sledding competion….lots of them have the different coloured eyes….striking to look at
anyways….it was a wierd tradition to have in a place that only had snow about once every 5 years for the event….. most of the time the huskies were hauling trollies around..lol
I still have a post-pneumonia lingering cough and I keep telling my doctor that I need her to prescribe an old-fashioned “rest cure” for a week in Florida or California.
Palm Springs! As an added bonus they all (the retired and the semi-retired, at least, and the vacationers) drink like fish 24/7 and there is such a thing as drinking a cold away. I’ve actually done it myself a few times.
Take care of that and I hope you have a steady supply of hot soup.
I missed that you were down with pneumonia – yikes! Glad to hear that you are in recovery. You know, a nice hot toddy of whisky, tea, and lemon will do wonders for that cough – or at least make you not care about it . . .
I actually probably had it by late November, not diagnosed until mid-December and I feel far better now than I did then but I’m still coughing a bit here and there. I’m seeing my doctor again next week as a followup and I wonder if I might get some new meds to try and clear it all the way.
Falling iguanas in the forecast for Florida:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/weather/2024/01/19/falling-iguanas-florida-weekend-weather-forecast/72269942007/
Yes, Meg, keep an eye on the sky if you’re walking outside. No iguanas up here in Orlando, but South Florida is covered with them.
Oh wow, thanks for the tip! I will keep my eyes open.
When we bought our little condo bolthole in South Beach we were standing outside the building and I noticed a little iguana climbing the wall next to us. The realtor followed my gaze and brushed it off the wall.
“Why did you do that? We’re in the tropics, aren’t we? Aren’t lizards part of the package?”
I loved going to Florida so much. It was so cheap at the time. And those early-morning flights from LaGuardia to MIA. I think Better Half and I were sometimes the only two non-Jews aboard. I loved every minute. I used to go to a kosher deli the day before and tote kosher meals onboard with me (pre-9/11, so no security theater nonsense) and offer it to seatmates. I can still taste the pastrami and the babka.
Anyone got a few million bucks to spare?
https://www.christies.com/en/events/private-and-iconic-collections/the-mark-knopfler-guitar-collection/what-is-on
OOOOH, yeah, I would want to be in on that.
I just want everyone to know I’m out of milk so I made my latte this morning with half and half and had two cookies for breakfast. I think they call that #winning.
Hell yeah that’s winning!!
Would you expect anything less?
https://www.commondreams.org/news/ron-wyden-social-security
So the planes crashed because of woke hiring?
https://popular.info/p/loose-bolts-open-door-to-racism
Do you have any rightwing relatives on Facebook that are promoting Russian disinformation? I have seen a rise in this again & if you see what many of the GOP are tweeting right now it is straight up Russian propaganda. If we don’t learn from history, we are going to repeat 2016, especially with a more desperate Putin…
https://www.bettedangerous.com/p/2016-election-attack-the-translator
This two parter on the problems of the establishment political press is really good:
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-01-17-metaphors-journalists-live-by-part-i/
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-01-18-metaphors-journalists-live-by-part-ii/
It describes an unnamed NY Times reporter who is animated by certainty about the superiority of his paper’s approach which has made him utterly at ease about passing judgment on things he doesn’t know about at all.
But it’s much better than a simple takedown. It digs into the methods behind the failure, and how the political press is not only using bad frameworks to understand the world, they’re hopelessly naive about what they’re doing.
The kind of curiousity and analysis needed to recognize and process change has practically been bred out of them. They’re reacting to the rise of fascism in the GOP like the invasive iguanas in Florida reacting to 40 degree weather – stunned incapacitation, followed by staggering off like nothing happened.
Just disgusting what happened in Uvalde.
Many of those cops shouldn’t have a job. They acted like real life Paul Blart Mall Cops when faced with an actual dangerous situation.
I know for me personally, the screams of those kids would haunt me more than the fear of getting shot/dying.
Yes, all this is true. You know what else is true? This will keep happening. A lot. Because Republicans don’t give a shit how many children are killed, as long as those kids are already out of the womb.
It’s hard to understate how much modern policing has been infected by consultants teaching police that their only job is self preservation.
It leads to both jumping to confront the harmless and running from confronting the harmful. And what it all leaves out is observing and understanding the situtation.
There’s a mindset that because there was no perfect option for the first officer who arrived, there were no options at all to reduce the toll. This kind of oversimplification and leaps of logic makes police consulting a lot simpler, but it’s a disaster for everyone else, including the police themselves.
So corrupt. So, so corrupt.
I predicted that Eric Adams would be a 180 from Bill de Lousy-o, the Hermit of Gracie Mansion, and out all the time, and he exceeded expectations. When does the man ever sleep? He especially loves flag-raisings, which I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of. But he could spend a little more time at City Hall, since we’re confronting multiple crises. The vice is tightening. Adams and Hochul are pointing their fingers at the Feds for not providing funding to deal with the migrant crisis, for example, and meanwhile Donald Trump is saying, “I’ll close the border like I did when I was last President.” Which do you think is the more popular response, taxpayer dollars for assistance, or border enforcement?
Which is insane, because we have something like 500,000 residents whose legal status is not quite clear. We all get along. The difference is most of them slip in quietly and make their own way, but for the migrants we, and everywhere I guess, feel we have an obligation to house, feed, and clothe the most recent arrivals. The latest stat I read is that we’ve taken in something like 100,000 during this latest open-border wave. We’re a city of 8.5 million. How would anyone even notice? And yet the 68,000 still “in the city’s care” is costing us billions? Something’s not adding up here. Adams cronyism. Sweetheart deals. And we have the tabloids beating the drum about crime waves and disease.
And the strange thing is they would probably be quite comfortable in my neighborhood. We have lots of African and Latin American immigrants, along with the Black people who have been here since after the Civil War, and the rental housing is reasonably priced, but as far as I know they haven’t placed any of them around here. No. They’re languishing in tents in miserable Floyd Bennett Field, in the middle of nowhere and exposed to the elements.
Aaargh. When is someone going to appoint me dictator?
Adams definitely comes across as someone who treats the game as more important than the prize. He’s kind of like the bored rich kid who shoplifts cheap earbuds when they have a credit card from their parents in their wallet and ten pairs of much better ones at home.
He’s corrupt to his core, but it’s for stuff like that fancy birthday cake at a firetrap club. And in a backwards way this kind of thing is even more corrosive. Over and over again you see good projects collapse with people like Adams in charge. And it’s not because there’s no benefit for them – getting something big off the ground would lead to all kinds of patronage jobs to hand out, campaign contributions, and a cushy job down the line.
They bend over backwards for chump change from venal people instead. It’s because they get a bigger charge from a free meal and a free suit than they do from earning vastly more legitimately.
The reality is that this is true everywhere. It’s always cheaper and easier to either put people in homes or build more homes so people can live there. Always. And yet, it’s never done because something something socialism (and also middle-men and -women don’t get cuts of the pie that way). It’s almost funny how hard governments and charities work to never just directly tackle the issue but instead make it convoluted and more expensive. Almost like they want it to work that way.
Moreover, New York is losing population (to age, to warmer climates, to outsourced work, etc.) and few places could use an influx of new population more. But of course, most people would rather stick a stake in their hometown’s heart (especially upstate) than allow non-white non-Americans to move in.
It’s also, and I don’t mean to come off like Ron Paul, the horrendous taxes and fees, especially in NYC. And congestion pricing? I’m sure that’s going to lure ambitious young people to the suburbs who would enjoy paying thousands of dollars a year to drive in and park in Manhattan.
When I first moved here (this was just before the Dinkins admin, but this conversation took place under Dinkins) I was at a party and a City Hall employee told me, “Well, the thing about New York is we, especially you, pay Swedish taxes and receive Somali services. I’m doing my best, but I can’t say the same for some of my coworkers.”
It was kind of funny at the time, and then we had Giuliani and Bloomberg, and Pataki up in Albany, so that was pretty good, but since then it’s been a horror show. An indifferent and helicoptered in Hillary Clinton as our junior Senator? Who asked for that? Over a billion dollars handed over to Chirlaine McCray, Bill de Lousy-o’s Lesbian wife, with no accountability, where did that go? How is that state investigation of Handsy Andy Cuomo and his henchman Howard “Butcher of Albany” Zucker’s hospital/nursing home response to the Covid epidemic going?
My God. I’d leave myself, but we have to wait for Faithful Hound to leave us first, and our dogs are famously long-lived. We would really like to retire overseas, which has its own craziness, but we don’t think Faithful Hound would survive the move. I’m sure I’d survive the move, but that’s why God created international shipping companies. God. The books alone…
Jeremy definitely looks a little dried out. Might need to use some turtle cream?
Sprots!
https://nypost.com/2024/01/19/sports/sports-illustrateds-entire-staff-told-they-are-getting-laid-off/
Not that I really follow sprots, but having grown up in the 1960s and 1970s I remember the Time Life premier titles, Time and Life and then SI and People. It’s horrible what’s happened to all of them. Same with Newsweek, which used to be a serious media source before Barry Diller and Tina Brown got involved.
I often feel like I should spend less time online and subscribe to more print publications, but which? Friends pass along NYT links with a little note saying like, “This will make your skin crawl, Mattie.” Even WashPo has gone down this strange–whatever. I will not editorialize, unlike the NYT, which throws in uninformed and unwanted opinion in the most mundane straightforward news stories.