TGIF! [DOT 22/7/22]

22/7/22 MegMegMcGee 32

I need to quit my job and curb my social life so I can watch this stuff live

Panel to focus on Trump’s defiant inaction as mob stormed Capitol
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/21/jan-6-committee-hearings-live-updates-day-8/

Wut, How?

This is fine.

Nasa images show extreme withering of Lake Mead over 22 years
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/21/nasa-images-lake-mead-drought

Brutal heat from Phoenix to Boston triggers alerts for 100 million
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/07/21/heatwave-heat-texas-us/

Not a bedbug, so he says.

Stonks!

Snap shares plunge 25% on disappointing second-quarter results and plans to slow hiring
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/21/snap-earnings-q2-2022.html

Umm, that sounds horrible!

‘Out of a horror movie’: Pennsylvania officer shoots snake around man’s neck
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/21/pennsylvania-officer-shoots-snake-man-neck

Have a great day!

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32 Comments

  1. Yesterday The Times went through a remarkable “struggle session” where no fewer than eight of their columnists were forced to make confessions in the Times‘ own opinion pages. Everyone loves a good show trial, Stalin certainly did, and this must have occurred at the behest of the new executive editor, Joe Kahn, its former managing editor (Harvard ’87, ’90). Along with Stephens confessing to the thought crime of denigrating Trump supporters, Michelle Goldberg is sorry to have been so quick to call on Al Franken to resign from the Senate. She was caught up in the #MeToo frenzy, apparently. Her thought crime confessional is a recantation in response to changing times: now the most pressing issue at the Times is to have as many (D) Senators as possible, and the loss of one is one too many, no matter the circumstances.

    Paul Krugman has a legitimate confession to make: he brushed off concerns that printing and releasing (figuratively) $1.9 trillion into a recovering American economy at one go might cause just the slightest upward tick in inflation.

    Also in the dock was Farhad Manjoo, who was forced to recant his previous full-throated approval and support for Facebook. We have always been at war with East AsiaFacebook is the Times‘ new line, it seems.

    As for myself, I avoided the show trials over at The Gray Lady and am reading a fascinating book about Kenya called The Ghosts of Happy Valley: Searching for the Lost World of Africa’s Infamous Aristocrats, which is about a group of wealthy and dissolute ex-pat Brits who lived in colonial Kenya between the wars. Much more wholesome and educational.

     

    • A better edited version of “I Ran”

      I raised a fist along the avenue
      I never thought I’d see a deranged mob like you
      See a deranged methed out mob like you
      With spears, clubs, zip ties and meth eyes
      The kind of eyes that I could control though
      I thought I could control though

      Yet I ran, I ran so fast that way
      I just ran, I ran when the fuckers came my way
      I flat out sped away.

      My presidential run is now dead
      People are pointing and laughing at me
      Totally freaked out was me
      The mob is moving nearer still
      The lynch mob comes in view
      The morons comes in view

      Yet I ran, I ran so fast that way
      I just ran, I ran when the fuckers came my way
      I flat out sped away.

    • I don’t think it was a coincidence that Rep. Andy Harris, who was one of the GOP reps who met with Trump about nullifying the election, was bringing a gun into the Capitol at that time. He knew who was coming.

    • An underreported fact is that former GOP Senator John Danforth was the guy who brought us both Clarence Thomas and Josh Hawley, championing them when they were both starting out and then being considered for major posts.

      Danforth was supposedly a moderate, thoughtful Republican, and an Episcopal priest. But he, Thomas and Hawley were all Yalies plugged in to the right wing legal network, and he didn’t hesitate for a second to promote horrible people up the ladder, even after Thomas was known to be a monster.

      So many of these monsters wouldn’t exist if the networks of supposedly smart, reasonable men weren’t pushing them forward despite their obvious intellectual and character flaws.

      • On behalf of Missourians, I apologize for John Danforth, too.

        Jan 7th, 2021 —

        Former Missouri U.S. Senator John Danforth told St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Tony Messenger that “Supporting Josh and trying so hard to get him elected to the Senate was the worst mistake I ever made in my life.” Danforth said the violence Wednesday at the U.S. Capitol was the “culmination of the long attempt to foment a lack of public confidence in our democratic system. It is very dangerous to America to continue pushing this idea that government doesn’t work and that voting was fraudulent.”

        Danforth told the Associated Press that he was “bamboozled” by Hawley and would no longer back him for re-election or a possible White House bid in 2024.

        Asked if he believes Hawley bears some responsibility for the attack on the Capitol, Danforth says simply, “Yes, I do.”

        (https://fox2now.com/news/john-danforth-danforth-supporting-josh-hawley-worst-mistake-i-ever-made-in-my-life/)

        And while yes, that was a very direct statement and surprising to hear, I also remember being like okay but Hawley has been a vocal piece of shit for a while now, you just turned on him because he openly aided in a coup.

  3. A bed bug infestation is better than an NYT op-ed infestation.

    Krugman… why apologize?  At the time when the gubiment dumped all that money into the economy, smart folks knew the price was going to be inflation BUT the money was needed to keep things from falling apart.

    I got lectured by one of my few remaining conservative friends about how we libs don’t know or understand economics and that dumping free money to keep things moving was going to hurt.  I told him:

    1) People’s lives depending on that money.  If inflation is the price then we’re going to have to pay it to keep most people alive.
    2) What the fuck do YOU right wingers know about economics?  Austerity, low taxes and deregulation hasn’t given us the Randian utopia you promised so what the fuck do you know?

    He hasn’t talked to me since.

    • Oh, fuck, nobody comes at me with that “You just don’t understand economics” bullshit. I am totally locked and loaded for that.

      Largely because “conservative economics” is a thin tissue of lies designed to support our current plutocracy. While economics is murky and unverifiable (my grad school professor is spinning in his grave right now), it’s pretty easy to point out examples of what doesn’t work, like you did, Manchu.

    • The recovery package’s benefits were undeniable. His sin, though, was that he denied that this would in any way be inflationary, which was the government’s party line. Of course it was going to be. Paul Krugman has a Nobel Prize in economics. If you took an intro econ class and a question was: If you increase the money supply by 10%, will that be inflationary? Y/N? and you answered N, you wouldn’t get a point for the question.

      • Serious question:  wasn’t the party line about not being inflationary actually about the Build Back Better bill (which S&M torpedoed like the actual Republicans that they are), and not about the stimulus?  Or did they say that about both?  I seem to recall that there were discussions along the line of “yes, this might cause inflation, but our options are limited.”

        • It was said about both and they made credible arguments because the unemployment rate was so high during the first one. But it was already coming down by the time the checks started arriving and because wages are so low in this country and so many people work multiple low-wage part-time jobs the unemployment bump actually exceeded their normal earnings. This, let me repeat, was all to the good. For example, food prices started increasing and spot shortages started emerging because people could actually buy food, or at least more and better food than they had been. Now couple this with pandemic-related shutdowns of major food processing centers, the decrease in the number of agricultural workers (most of whom were not eligible for the stimulus, by the way), the shortage of truck drivers, the part-time grocery workers who were earning more by staying home than they would by entering potentially lethal workplaces–all of this could have been foreseen, and was. But not by Paul Krugman.

  4. I don’t get people who keep exotic pets like snakes that can kill you. I personally prefer to keep my distance from things that can kill me (and that includes guns even though I was taught the basic gun safety rules.)

  8. I have a question and maybe one of you knows the answer.

    There has been a fawn (not a baby) who has been hanging out by herself under a tree by the pasture for two days (today is the second).  She looks healthy and can stand up but she’s alone (there’s usually a family of them that come through) and she doesn’t seem to want to leave that spot.  There are no visible injuries.  There are no predators around.

    I know we’re not supposed to interfere with wildlife in any way, and the Wildlife service here says that 99% of the time there is no intervention needed.   My wife is upset but I’m not sure if there’s anything we could be doing or someone we should be calling.  Any ideas?

  10. In random news, my experiment in the garden of “can I grow cucumbers?” is going really well. I’m not a super huge cucumber fan (like I plant several peppers because I fucking love sweet peppers), so I just planted one cucumber plant. It was a variety that the little info insert said “does well in containers” because the large planter was what I had available for it.  I’ve harvested 6 this week. While some are that weird lopsided thing that can happen, toss up if it’s because I can’t water consistently or there’s inconsistent pollination. I don’t fucking care, they’re still edible.

    Anyways, this afternoon I’m making some refridgerator pickles because I need to do something with these!

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