> He was right about Russia, which we spent years howling in laughter about what kind of stupid shit ass would think Russia was a threat
Romney *was* wrong about Russia *at the time*.
After Obama was elected, Putin saw the ever-present latent racism that started crawling out of the woodwork. He embraced and channeled it, such that his intermediaries and cut-outs gave him indirect influence over the Republican electorate; *that* is what allowed him to *become* a threat. If the US political system stood unified -- as they had in the past, against Soviet Russia™ -- against belligerent moves from Putin, he wouldn't have become a threat.
A revanchist Russia was inevitable after the fall of the USSR. And if it wasn't Putin, it would be some other authoritarian shithead. And a revanchist Russia would be bound to be particularly hostile to the empire that has spent the years since their fall congratulating ourselves for "winning the Cold War" and exporting our own tinny, shallow, exploitative culture to a land and a people far older than us. Titty bars and Pop Tarts and vulture capitalism. Who wouldn't feel a bit annoyed?
The Mitt Romney article was good. He deserves every bit of derision we heaped on him during his clueless-plutocrat presidential run and his weird attempts to play the "man of the people" during his Senate campaign. It was ridiculous.
And yet, occasionally he does not-terrible things. Part of me says "oh you sweet summer child" when he had his epiphany that Republicans suck, BUT - if he's willing to put his name on stories about the Senate being a day centre for geriatric white men (and a few women) who still want to feel important, and how fucking craven and lazy his Republican colleagues are - fine, he gets half a cookie.
His legacy is going to be that photo of him looking daggers at Josh Hawley. Never gets old.
Exceptional tabs this morning, especially the McKay Coppins and crypto-credulity articles. It's almost noon and I haven't accomplished a single item on my "to-do" list, so thanks for that :)
I cannot say too much about the specifics of how I know this article documents a legit lunatic without doxxing myself, but this article documents a complete insane person. He is insane. In. Sane. Absolutely batshit.
Sorry, TL;DR, but I can't help myself. More about the trees in Michigan.
I was once driving across Michigan with the teenage kid, and mentioned some highway project that was being discussed that would take out a bunch of trees and some people were upset about it. The kid, outraged, waved his arms around pointedly at the scenery we were driving through. "Trees? They're upset about trees? Look around you! All we have is trees!" Although I understood the peoples' upset, I could also see his point. There are a LOT of trees.
I have seen trees growing in the gutters of abandoned buildings in Detroit - not seedlings, but trees, and not abandoned houses, but three-story warehouses.
I have watched over the years as trees grew through the cracks in the parking lot pavement of an abandoned commercial property I drove by every day on my way home from work.
One spring I pulled more than 1,000 maple tree seedlings from the gardens in my yard - I counted them and finally quit counting at 1,000. I kept pulling up seedlings, though.
My neighbor has a tree that his son brought home as a seedling on Arbor Day 50+ years ago. That tree, decades later, begot a seedling in our garden that I didn't pull, but nursed through the winter and planted in the spring maybe 10 years ago. It is now way taller than our two story house. And the seedlings keep appearing, but I have no more space plant them. Ditto the neighbor on the other side's redbud tree. That redbud begot a seedling - a volunteer, we call them - that grew in the hole left in the berm - 50 feet away - where the maple tree was knocked over in a windstorm. That redbud is beautiful in the Spring.
When I was a girl, the one and only episode of Wagon Train I ever watched involved the group traversing a forested swamp. There was a guy with a piano which was too heavy to make the trip. He insisted if they left the piano, he would not continue, so they left him there, in the forested swamp, playing his piano. I didn't know why that episode resonated so for me. I don't play piano.
But now I live in the forested swamp. If people were not here to beat back the vegetation - plow the fields, mow the lawns, trim the bushes (and pull the seedlings) - nature would take it back faster than you'd expect. And I really kind of love that about the place.
if we all died out, it wouldn't be that long before Nature reclaimed the Earth, and our biggest conurbations would be as thoroughly buried and erased as the cities of the Mayans. "Look on my works, and Despair" indeed. We are like a skin disease of earth waiting for Her immune system to cure it.
Re: Atlantic article about Romney - if you were raised in a religious Republican culture like me, he will remind you of the men who raised you. I wish Romney could have had a bigger reckoning earlier in life, especially about how his policies affected people who don’t look like or live like him. Yelling at Josh Hawley won’t undo that track record, but I’m still glad he did it so we can contrast it with Republicans’ hypocritical private scorn and public fealty.
Yeah, he seems to have a lot in common with my late father, who had his great "oh they're actually shitheads" moment with the Republicans after the ways they attacked Democrat Max Cleland during his 1996 Senatorial campaign. He also hated Newt Gingrich with a passion.
And one of the reasons is that, with younger kids, it's not that goddamn hard to put a stop to it. I worked with preschool kids for fifteen years, worked in and ran an out of school program for elementary age also for a good part of that time.
And yes, once they get to about Grade Four, it's a lot harder to keep a lid on bullying - they're more subtle about it, and harder to catch. But if you've been paying any attention at all, you can do a LOT in the years before that, and much of that work will continue into later years, as kids with a good grounding in how not to be assholes don't just lose it all. Bystander kids who know that the adults will have their backs can - and do -make a big difference by calling out the bullying of peers, even if it doesn't happen where the adults see it.
Even in the best possible world, you are going to have a little bullying. But a school with a major bullying problem is a school that is deliberately allowing it. This isn't a case of a huge and complex difficult problem that the school can't possibly deal with, it's a case of school not bothering to do very basic and not that hard diligence. It's harder to stop your fourth graders, but it's easy to stop your first graders, and second graders - and if you've been doing that, half of the work later on is already done.
"The trees are just the right height." Yes, yes they are. Glad that Rebecca noticed that.
My mom, born and bred East Coast city girl, had to move to Michigan to be closer to me when she got old. For her, it was like moving to Mars, honestly. But when Mitt Romney said that about the trees, my mom's response was "You know, he's right about that." She kept her brain, mostly, right to the end. I hope to be that lucky.
They're the right height but some of them are the wrong color. Really threw me off. In Georgia the trees are all apple green and kelly green and hunter green, but some of the ones in Michigan are more of a sage green that I'm not used to seeing outside of landscaping.
I always took that comment to mean that things look right to you, because it's what you grew up with.
I remember so clearly, after living in southern Ontario, making a late summer trip home to the prairies, and feeling emotionally overcome, as the plane descended, to see the yellow/golden landscape, rather than all that unnatural - to me - green I'd been living with.
Today’s header gif features a sengi from the Nature Bites channel. More sexy info at the click: https://open.substack.com/pub/martiniambassador/p/sengi-stud-supplies-steady-sexitimes
Standard joke, the elephant shrew is more closely related to an elephant than a shrew.
I know you're busy.
Do you have clever aweho,rtdd huntsdy?
OpOps, I meant that to someone else.
To someone named R. T. D. D. Huntsdy who may or may not have a clever aweho, whatever an aweho is?
LOL, that's good because I had no idea what you were on about! 😀
Is that a proboscis or are you just glad to see me?
Ted Cruz's daily affirmation in the mirror.
Fuck Ted Cruz.
All hail, The Stud!
Sometimes, when a mouse and an anteater love each other very much...
Now that's a deep cut.
I understand this reference.
I didn't. But that's why God invented Google.
God invented a system for delivering 5 pages of adds on top of your actual search result?
Sometimes She likes to play with us a little.
Not in my experience, frankly.
> He was right about Russia, which we spent years howling in laughter about what kind of stupid shit ass would think Russia was a threat
Romney *was* wrong about Russia *at the time*.
After Obama was elected, Putin saw the ever-present latent racism that started crawling out of the woodwork. He embraced and channeled it, such that his intermediaries and cut-outs gave him indirect influence over the Republican electorate; *that* is what allowed him to *become* a threat. If the US political system stood unified -- as they had in the past, against Soviet Russia™ -- against belligerent moves from Putin, he wouldn't have become a threat.
A revanchist Russia was inevitable after the fall of the USSR. And if it wasn't Putin, it would be some other authoritarian shithead. And a revanchist Russia would be bound to be particularly hostile to the empire that has spent the years since their fall congratulating ourselves for "winning the Cold War" and exporting our own tinny, shallow, exploitative culture to a land and a people far older than us. Titty bars and Pop Tarts and vulture capitalism. Who wouldn't feel a bit annoyed?
The Mitt Romney article was good. He deserves every bit of derision we heaped on him during his clueless-plutocrat presidential run and his weird attempts to play the "man of the people" during his Senate campaign. It was ridiculous.
And yet, occasionally he does not-terrible things. Part of me says "oh you sweet summer child" when he had his epiphany that Republicans suck, BUT - if he's willing to put his name on stories about the Senate being a day centre for geriatric white men (and a few women) who still want to feel important, and how fucking craven and lazy his Republican colleagues are - fine, he gets half a cookie.
His legacy is going to be that photo of him looking daggers at Josh Hawley. Never gets old.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErGHAiqXAAEpRH2?format=webp&name=small
Obamacare is a national version of Romneycare. It's no Medicare for All, but I'll credit Mitt for taking the step in the right direction.
I like the one where he's having a plate of Corbeau with PAB looking on.
He looked like something big and painful was lodged in his colon.
Exceptional tabs this morning, especially the McKay Coppins and crypto-credulity articles. It's almost noon and I haven't accomplished a single item on my "to-do" list, so thanks for that :)
That Techdirt story should be the final nail in the coffin for the idea that Elon is some kind of Tony Stark super genius.
I cannot say too much about the specifics of how I know this article documents a legit lunatic without doxxing myself, but this article documents a complete insane person. He is insane. In. Sane. Absolutely batshit.
Phony Stark.
I know, right? Should be, but won't be. Terrifying.
G'Morning!
Quote of the day: "Under the sky, under the heavens there is but one family."
-- Bruce Lee
A really dysfunctional family, but a family nonetheless.
Mornin!
...nerd baiting! Here for it.
Sorry, TL;DR, but I can't help myself. More about the trees in Michigan.
I was once driving across Michigan with the teenage kid, and mentioned some highway project that was being discussed that would take out a bunch of trees and some people were upset about it. The kid, outraged, waved his arms around pointedly at the scenery we were driving through. "Trees? They're upset about trees? Look around you! All we have is trees!" Although I understood the peoples' upset, I could also see his point. There are a LOT of trees.
I have seen trees growing in the gutters of abandoned buildings in Detroit - not seedlings, but trees, and not abandoned houses, but three-story warehouses.
I have watched over the years as trees grew through the cracks in the parking lot pavement of an abandoned commercial property I drove by every day on my way home from work.
One spring I pulled more than 1,000 maple tree seedlings from the gardens in my yard - I counted them and finally quit counting at 1,000. I kept pulling up seedlings, though.
My neighbor has a tree that his son brought home as a seedling on Arbor Day 50+ years ago. That tree, decades later, begot a seedling in our garden that I didn't pull, but nursed through the winter and planted in the spring maybe 10 years ago. It is now way taller than our two story house. And the seedlings keep appearing, but I have no more space plant them. Ditto the neighbor on the other side's redbud tree. That redbud begot a seedling - a volunteer, we call them - that grew in the hole left in the berm - 50 feet away - where the maple tree was knocked over in a windstorm. That redbud is beautiful in the Spring.
When I was a girl, the one and only episode of Wagon Train I ever watched involved the group traversing a forested swamp. There was a guy with a piano which was too heavy to make the trip. He insisted if they left the piano, he would not continue, so they left him there, in the forested swamp, playing his piano. I didn't know why that episode resonated so for me. I don't play piano.
But now I live in the forested swamp. If people were not here to beat back the vegetation - plow the fields, mow the lawns, trim the bushes (and pull the seedlings) - nature would take it back faster than you'd expect. And I really kind of love that about the place.
if we all died out, it wouldn't be that long before Nature reclaimed the Earth, and our biggest conurbations would be as thoroughly buried and erased as the cities of the Mayans. "Look on my works, and Despair" indeed. We are like a skin disease of earth waiting for Her immune system to cure it.
First week in a long time I've felt everything is going to be OK.
I know the world is generally fucked, but just for myself, it will be OK.
Re: Atlantic article about Romney - if you were raised in a religious Republican culture like me, he will remind you of the men who raised you. I wish Romney could have had a bigger reckoning earlier in life, especially about how his policies affected people who don’t look like or live like him. Yelling at Josh Hawley won’t undo that track record, but I’m still glad he did it so we can contrast it with Republicans’ hypocritical private scorn and public fealty.
Yeah, he seems to have a lot in common with my late father, who had his great "oh they're actually shitheads" moment with the Republicans after the ways they attacked Democrat Max Cleland during his 1996 Senatorial campaign. He also hated Newt Gingrich with a passion.
my father stopped voting Republican 1; when he was liberated by the death of my mother and 2: Reagan's embrace of the purulent likes of Jerry Falwell.
The racial bullying story is breaking my heart.
And one of the reasons is that, with younger kids, it's not that goddamn hard to put a stop to it. I worked with preschool kids for fifteen years, worked in and ran an out of school program for elementary age also for a good part of that time.
And yes, once they get to about Grade Four, it's a lot harder to keep a lid on bullying - they're more subtle about it, and harder to catch. But if you've been paying any attention at all, you can do a LOT in the years before that, and much of that work will continue into later years, as kids with a good grounding in how not to be assholes don't just lose it all. Bystander kids who know that the adults will have their backs can - and do -make a big difference by calling out the bullying of peers, even if it doesn't happen where the adults see it.
Even in the best possible world, you are going to have a little bullying. But a school with a major bullying problem is a school that is deliberately allowing it. This isn't a case of a huge and complex difficult problem that the school can't possibly deal with, it's a case of school not bothering to do very basic and not that hard diligence. It's harder to stop your fourth graders, but it's easy to stop your first graders, and second graders - and if you've been doing that, half of the work later on is already done.
In fourth grade, my bully was my teacher.
And that is a different, and to my mind even bigger, heartbreak.
Kids had no rights or recourse in the 50s and 60s. I got stories.
Today's Ruben Bolling!
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/14/2193083/-Cartoon-One-Day-in-France-1940-as-presented-by-Elon-Musk
I woke up with a headache. So that’s fun and new. Usually I earn my headaches as the day goes on. I find myself annoyed by this experience.
Why wait till the last minute? Then it's rush, rush, rush.
I'm with Oliver on this one. Whatever spine Mittens has was not nearly enough, and he and his premonitions of death can fuck themselves.
https://substack.com/inbox/post/137036077
I agree with you - a couple terms of late-in-life principled stands does not undo a career of Republican policy harm.
This will be the first Thanksgiving in, like, 5 years that we AREN'T sailing in the BVI!! Have fun - it's amazing!!!
"The trees are just the right height." Yes, yes they are. Glad that Rebecca noticed that.
My mom, born and bred East Coast city girl, had to move to Michigan to be closer to me when she got old. For her, it was like moving to Mars, honestly. But when Mitt Romney said that about the trees, my mom's response was "You know, he's right about that." She kept her brain, mostly, right to the end. I hope to be that lucky.
They're the right height but some of them are the wrong color. Really threw me off. In Georgia the trees are all apple green and kelly green and hunter green, but some of the ones in Michigan are more of a sage green that I'm not used to seeing outside of landscaping.
I always took that comment to mean that things look right to you, because it's what you grew up with.
I remember so clearly, after living in southern Ontario, making a late summer trip home to the prairies, and feeling emotionally overcome, as the plane descended, to see the yellow/golden landscape, rather than all that unnatural - to me - green I'd been living with.