“It is amazing how many of their hopes and dreams did centre on Hunter Biden’s addiction, Hunter Biden’s sex life, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and interesting for a political party that has based so much on ‘nothing matters’ to discover to their disappointment that nothing matters,” said Charlie Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind.
“Haven’t they sort of established a small universe where nothing matters? You can pay off a porn star and it doesn’t make a difference. Did they really think that somehow Hunter Biden was going to make a difference?”
More Charlie Sykes:
Sykes, founder and editor-at-large of the Bulwark website, said: “It’s also a story of a very loving and loyal father and it’s hard to turn that into a negative. There are a lot of parents out there that know how dealing with a child who has problems is one of the greatest challenges you can face and so I think people are as likely to be empathetic as they are to see it as a negative.
“Not to mention the fact that in the context of Joe Biden losing two of his children and his first wife under tragic circumstances, it puts the Hunter Biden story in a very different light. I’ve always thought it was deeply cynical that Trump wanted to exploit that as a weakness, to go after the one living son of a man who suffered through so much tragedy.”
As for Hunter’s book:
None of this gives Republicans the ammunition they hoped for. Politically, the book has been a dog that didn’t bark (unlike Biden’s actual dogs, Champ and Major, which have made headlines over biting incidents and excrement in a White House hallway) and, instead of turning into a liability, only appears to reinforce Biden’s image as compassionate and humane.
The book appears to be a well written and brutally honest portrayal of his descent into hell and return to the land of the living.
Eye-Gouging Capitol Rioter in ‘Shock’ Over Detention With ‘Inner-City Crimes’ Inmates: Lawyer
Thomas Webster, a Capitol rioter who attacked a police officer with a metal pole and attempted to gouge his eyes, is said to be in “shock” over being detained with people who committed “inner-city” crimes, his lawyer said Friday.
According to Washington Post reporter Rachel Weiner, Webster’s lawyer said he is being detained in a “dormitory setting,” after police arrested him in connection with violently storming the U.S. Capitol building on January 6.
“For a middle aged guy whose never been arrested before this has been a shock for him,” his lawyer said, while adding that his record outside of the attack is “sparkling.”
Webster, 54, is a retired New York City Police officer and former Marine who at times performed high-profile duties in his career—including working perimeter security at City Hall and the New York mayoral residence, according to News 4.
Webster surrendered himself to the FBI on February 22, after he was accused of using a large metal pole to attack a Capitol police officer on January 6.
Photos and video footage have shown Webster striking the officer several times with the pole while holding a Marine Corps flag. He has also been accused of attempting to gouge the officer’s eyes, and prompting him to choke after ripping off his mask.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Benjamin Gianforti said in February that video footage at the events showed Webster attacking an officer “clear as day.”
…
Webster has since been charged with assaulting police officers with a deadly weapon, obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder, knowingly entering a restricted area, disorderly conduct in a restricted area, engaging in physical violence in a restricted area and violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, CNN reported.
According to Weiner, Webster is currently being detained in different facilities around the country as he awaits to face charges in D.C.
In February, Gianforti said federal sentencing guidelines would recommend at least five years in prison if Webster chose not to go to trial and pleads guilty to the charges. If convicted at trial, the recommended prison term would be much higher, News 4 reported.
The worst flashpoint last week was in Belfast at the interface of the Lanark Way peace wall, the Orwellian name for barriers that separate neighbourhoods.
Young people from the loyalist Shankill Road and youths from the nationalist Springfield Road waged an aerial bombardment of rocks, bottles and petrol bombs. At one point the gate caught fire and was breached, with interlopers briefly milling in enemy territory, hurling taunts as well as missiles.
In the fresh light of morning you could still read a faded, smudged message painted on the wall, like a message passed down from another era: “There was never a good war or a bad peace.”
Few in Northern Ireland would consider the Troubles, which cost 3,700 lives, a good war. The problem is those who chafe at an imperfect peace and who forget, or never knew, the alternative.
Hunter admits that “in the last five years alone, my two-decades-long marriage has dissolved, guns have been put in my face, and at one point I dropped clean off the grid, living in $59-a-night Super 8 motels off I-95 while scaring my family even more than myself”.
In an interview about the book on CBS, the president’s son recalled going 13 days without sleep as he smoked crack and drank vodka. “I spent more time on my hands and knees picking through rugs – smoking anything that even remotely resembled crack cocaine. I probably smoked more Parmesan cheese than anyone that you know.”
The Biden family staged an intervention at their home in Delaware in 2019, inviting two counselors from a rehab centre to dinner. Hunter swore and ran from the house but was chased down the driveway by his father, who “grabbed me, swung me around, and hugged me. He held me tight in the dark and cried for the longest time. Everybody was outside now.”
Can you imagine Donald Trump caring about his kids that much? Of course you can’t.
@Teve: I had such a moment with my youngest. Not quite as dramatic but every bit as searing. I’m not sure I could read the book. The fear never really goes away.
Inslee read me some data he had gotten from the Republican messaging maven Frank Luntz, which the governor said was going to inform new public-awareness campaigns that the state is developing to break through to Republican men, the people most likely to say they won’t get vaccinated, according to polling. Two appeals seem to work best: First, the vaccines are safe, and they’re more effective than the flu vaccine. Second, you deserve this, and getting vaccinated will help preserve your liberty and encourage the government to lift restrictions. (That last idea is what Jerry Falwell Jr. focused on in the vaccination selfie he posted this week, captioned, “Please get vaccinated so our nutcase of a governor will have less reasons for mindless restrictions!”) Inslee hopes that emphasizing those points will persuade more Republican men to get their shots. But he’s not sure it will work.
The prospect of lower health-care costs has led conservatives to back health-related regulations in the past. In 1991, Pete Wilson, then the Republican governor of California, signed a law mandating helmets for motorcyclists, and made a conservative argument for the new regulation. “We don’t know exactly how much money and how many lives will be saved with this legislation,” Wilson said at the signing ceremony, which was held at a hospital in the state capital. “But we do know that the cost of not enacting it is too great for a civilized society to bear.” Then again, President Ronald Reagan was famously resistant to seatbelt and airbag laws, which also reduce health-care spending.
“But Uscinski cites one major difference about this particular moment in time: Trump.
The former reality TV personality launched his political career in 2011 by touting racist claims that former President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. As a 2016 presidential candidate, Trump revived a disproved allegation about Muslims in New Jersey watching and celebrating as the twin towers came down on 9/11. That sort of rhetoric didn’t live on in a vacuum; there were 127 reported assaults committed against Muslims in 2016, the highest total since 2001.
“He wasn’t chasing your regular Republican,” Uscinski said. “He was chasing someone who was motivated by conspiracy theories and antiestablishment views.””
There’s the fact the virus will continue to circulate among unvaccinated people, and keep mutating to produce more variants. To lesser degree than it’s doing now, yes, because the number of people who won’t take a vaccine is relatively small. But it remains large enough that a variant could emerge that the current vaccines won’t deal with, or not as effectively.
BTW, we’ve been lucky so far that the deadliest contagious diseases are hard to catch, like AIDS and Ebola. that is, they are really hard to get through casual contact, like passing too close to someone on the street. While diseases that are easy to catch, like flu and COVID are far less dangerous (not saying COVID’s not dangerous, just not as dangerous as Ebola).
Eventually we’ll get a highly contagious disease that is also very deadly. Something like Smallpox or bubonic plague. the disgraceful performance of much of the West during the COVID pandemic doesn’t bode well for when that eventually happens.
@Kathy: i learned something new a few days ago. Did you know there are cases of asymptomatic Ebola? It’s only like 2-3% of people exposed, but it’s real.
@Kathy: Right. Covid is extremely transmissible, but not super-severe. “The Big One” that virologists and epidemiologists worry about is not here yet. But if this pandemic indicates how we’ll respond to The Big One, everyone outside Asia will be F’d in the A.
A few months ago, there was an article by a genetic virologist outlining that there are a finite number of adaptions covid can make that could make it more contagious and/or make it more serious or deadly. IIRC the reasons revolve around how and which cells that the virus attacks. I’d take that as good long term news and to be cynical, the more hosts that exists to allow those adaptions to take place, the faster the virus can burn through its options.
Given that it is doubtful that we’ll reach herd immunity, even within individual nations or next best hope is that Covid-19 does burn through its genetic options and actually becomes the equivalent of the flu.
Sidney Powell: “Just realize they took the two most pathetic candidates in the history of the Democratic Party. A vice president who didn’t even win a primary in her own state. And a demented pervert, among other things, who can’t even tie his own shoelaces or know where he is and they crammed them up our nose with a fork of fraud so blatant that it is visible around the world.”
@Teve:
Gee willickers, The Gateway Pundit is one of the authoritative news sources most often posted at Lucianne.com. Never mind that GP has to disappear about half its articles because they’re invented out of whole cloth.
GP articles also have a big presence in creationist discussion forums, cuz dumb.
One term which I believe was coined originally to describe creationist arguments is the Argument from Personal Incredulity. This is the fallacy where you reject a claim on the grounds that you cannot understand how it can possibly be true–e.g. I can’t understand how the eye could have evolved by Darwinian evolution, therefore it must have been created. There’s another example from the Sidney Powell quote above: Biden and Harris are the most pathetic candidates imaginable, therefore they could not possibly have won except through fraud. I’ve been seeing versions of this argument from Trumpists on a regular basis since the election, including the more common claim that Biden couldn’t have won since he “never left his bunker.”
The Argument from Personal Incredulity is not something only dumb people engage in; we all do it to some degree, some of the time (it’s related to confirmation bias). But it seems to be especially common among Trumpists (I have no idea what Powell herself believes, I’m talking about her audience), who are as a rule people completely incapable of introspection. They don’t just believe Biden was a uniquely pathetic candidate and that Trump was an awesome one, it is literally impossible for them to even conceptualize the notion that this analysis that’s been fed to them might be flawed. It is as self-evident to them as that the sun will rise tomorrow–and hell, I’ve probably engaged in more self-examination of that assumption than they’ve engaged with anything they believe in their entire lives.
@Teve:
In the summer of 2016, GP ran a piece claiming breathlessly that there would be a “black uprising” at promptly 7:30 p.m. the following day in major U.S. cities. Needless to say, this never happened. The article vanished. It later emerged that the sole source for the piece was a hoax email from a few years before.
I’ve never figured out if Hoft knows that most of what he prints is utter horseshit, and he doesn’t care, or if he believes it.
During the sentencing hearing, Hunter (the perp) read a letter to the judge detailing how much her husband and three children had suffered because of what she did. Through tears and sniffles, Hunter explained how her social circle had shrunk and how her children had been ostracized by their peers.
In sentencing, Ruth focused on the potential impact Hunter’s saliva-spewing cough could have had on Sprague and the lack of remorse or empathy for the way the attack affected her victim.
“I didn’t hear much about your client’s concern for the actual victim in this case,” the judge said, addressing Hunter’s attorney. “I haven’t heard about the potential deadly impact this could have had on all of them [Sprague’s family], not only because of covid, but someone who has cancer and a compromised immune system.”
The judge noted Hunter’s daring tone in the video and her obscene gesture and said it negated her claim that she’s been concerned about the social media consequences.
@Kylopod: there are several logical fallacies that creationists engage in among their 500 to 600 common arguments. One of them is the fallacy of the undistributed middle.
Premise 1: Scientists are Atheists
Premise 2: Scientists are Darwinists
Conclusion: Darwinism is Atheistic
It’s not true of course, I have a friend who is both a PhD evolutionary biologist and a devout Christian.
They also like the Appeal to Consequences fallacy. “Evolution can’t be true, because if it is, my literal reading of the Book of Genesis is wrong.”
They make literally hundreds of terrible arguments:
Imagine what life would be like today if at the height of the polio pandemic, people decided they didn’t want to get vaccinated because they thought they knew more about the vaccines than the scientists who made them.
One facet of the Nothern Ireland flare up not being reported on enough is that two of the big loyalist militas, the UDA and the UVF, were heavily involved in drug trafficking across the Irish Sea, and the Northern Ireland Protocol part of Brexit has strangled their supply lines, costing them a lot of income.
Way back in 1969 when I was allegedly in college there were four of us guys who rented a 2 bedroom house in town to save money and basically have a place to drink cheap beer, smoke dope and drop acid. $100/month. Even at that we couldn’t afford a phone when we first moved in. When we finally did it was a 2 party line in town. The cheapest service available.
It wasn’t long before one guy had his girlfriend over every night and I was sleeping on the living room couch.
This was an small old house with no insulation or storm windows and very thin interior walls. It got to be annoying when some of us were studying late at night and could hear them…well…you get the picture. Pretty soon love turned sour and the real life daytime soap opera would start. Endless screaming and yelling. Then we heard what turned out to be the goldfish bowl, Little Goldie, water and all hit the wall after it bounced off someones head. Later there was the distinct sound of punches being thrown. Then they would both come out to the living room and show us their bruises and battle scars “See where he hit me!” “See where she hit me!”
Before they found a place of their own and moved out they were literally beating each other with cast iron cookware. Masochism Tango. Maybe sometimes it’s funny in songs. In real life not so much.
Their is no barrier to holding devout religious beliefs and believing in science including evolution. One need only believe that at some point in evolutionary development, god inserted in humans, a soul or holy spirit, whatever you want to call it. The existence or non-existence of God is unprovable, making belief an article of faith.
There is a barrier, if your belief requires literal interpretation of bible, koran or torah.
@Sleeping Dog:..One need only believe that at some point in evolutionary development, god inserted in humans, a soul or holy spirit, whatever you want to call it.
The vaccines aren’t actually vaccines. Dr. Fauci and the globalists conned Trump into thinking they were. They’re actually “bizarre biological injections” that will have very sinister after-effects.
“It’s hard to make predictions. Especially about the future.”
Nature, and biology in particular, has come nowhere near exhausting its capacity to surprise us. We can hope for the best, but we should still plan for the worst.
@Kylopod:
No. I think their belief is that he was just one lone man heroically waging a lonely battle against a government full of of deep-state globalists.
It’s funny, GP can post things that are baldly de-contextualized facts and plainly editorialize in a headline, and yet convince readers that “the MSM” is biased and avoids stories that disrupt their narrative.
Another funny thing, posters like the recent one who defended the voter fraud narrative, then when faced with evidence shifted to a perception-based argument routinely misuse fallacies and common specific sources of error like confirmation bias.
I suspect it’s easy to track phrases, in both Left and Right ecosystems, to a recent widely publicized source. But almost everyone maintains that they think for themselves.
@Sleeping Dog: yeah the scientists and philosophers I’ve known who are Christians consider that Ken Ham-style biblical literalism to be simple-minded nonsense.
Reactions to the Former Guy’s speech at the R grifter meeting.
A slew of well-heeled Republican National Committee donors descended on Palm Beach this weekend, excited to be schmoozed, eager for access to DONALD TRUMP and other potential 2024 nominees, but mostly interested in hearing how far their dollars would go toward winning back the Congress and White House.
Trump’s speech didn’t do any of that.
“It was horrible, it was long and negative,” one attendee with a donor in the room tells Playbook. “It was dour. He didn’t talk about the positive things that his administration has done.”
Instead, Trump used the final night of the retreat to talk about himself, his grievances and how he plans to enact retribution against those who voted to impeach him — which runs counter to the donors’ main objective of making sure their dollars go toward winning overall.
Trump’s biggest applause line, according to sources in the room, was when he said the GOP would win back the House 2022 and the presidency in 2024. He lavished praise on Florida Gov. RON DESANTIS, South Dakota Gov. KRISTI NOEM, and Wisconsin Sen. RON JOHNSON. But when he was harshly critical of people like former VP MIKE PENCE and Senate Republican Leader MITCH MCCONNELL, few people applauded.
Many major donors have been fed up with Trump’s antics since Jan. 6. While Trump was speaking, we spotted at least two — both of whom received prominent appointments during his administration — out dining with friends at a local restaurant in Palm Beach rather than sitting through the former president’s dinner at Mar-a-Lago.
As Playbook and the New York Times have reported, Trump has become a complication for donors. They don’t want their money going toward his retribution efforts. Remember: These are exorbitantly wealthy people — some with egos as big as Trump’s — and they are not interested in hearing about how another rich guy had his ego bruised. The fact that they even had to shuttle from the Four Seasons resort where the retreat was being held to Mar-a-Lago for Trump’s speech was enough of a sign of fealty to Trump, donors told us.
Trump’s lack of interest in the state of the Republican Party also creates a problem for fundraising: Per the NYT, Trump’s new fundraising enterprise has $85 million in cash on hand, while the RNC has $84 million. This comes just days after the RNC officially responded to a cease-and-desist demand from Trump’s lawyers over the use of his likeness for fundraising. It’s just a reminder that the party can’t quit Trump — which GOP fundraiser Fred Zeidman told the NYT was “a tremendous complication.”
Had to turn off All Things Considered. They were in rural Tennessee talking to dumb dipshits ‘Vaccine Resisters’ and I made it through the guy who said, “I don’t need a vaccine, I’m healthy, and I don’t trust…well I’m just Anti-Vaxx to be honest.” But I had to switch it off when the lady said, “Now, I’m not against the vaccine cuza Trump, we all voted for Trump but we wuz gonna get the vaccine, but then our family doctor died of Covid, and who’s to say it weren’t the vaccine that killed him?” and I spent the rest of the drive in blissful quiet.
@Teve: “According to Weiner, Webster is currently being detained in different facilities around the country as he awaits to face charges in D.C.”
I wish I understood what that sentence means in real life. Has he been chopped up into little pieces, for example? If so, how is he going to be able to stand trial? Are prosecutors doing that thing they always talk about on L & O where an arrestee is transferred from one precinct to another, one holding facility to another, Rikers and back, whatnot, for the purpose of preventing him from receiving adequate counsel and/or delay him making bail? (If the second, is this the message we want to send about the importance of process, rule of law, quality of the justice system?) Adding “around the country” to the mix makes it seem like an abuse of both process and government funds. Very confusing.
@CSK: @Kathy: If either one of those moves will increase the aggregate number of vaccinated persons, fine, I can live with it. I doubt that dough heads that are rejecting the vaccine would take Trumpcine either, though.
@Teve: The Seattle home I grew up in–which sold to a single-income blue collar family in 1952 for a whopping $12,000, sold last last June for $620,000. Ms. Ball is preaching to the choir. But change is not going to come until some other nation is able to take over as the economic powerhouse that supports itself by self-financing its own deficits because letting the current house of cards fall destroys the world as we know it. If the US government were to fail economically, subsistence agriculture would become the new global standard of wealth because subsistence farmers can eat–which will be more than most of the world would be able to say.
I wish I understood what that sentence means in real life. Has he been chopped up into little pieces, for example?
It probably means they he’s just going throught the Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation System to get back to DC, which is notorious for 1) taking forever, 2) involving crazy routes due to the way the flights are scheduled, 3) being a miserable experience for the prisoners
That is, it’s another case of an 1/6 insurrection acting like it’s unfair they’re being treated the same way every other federal prisoner gets treated.
I wish I understood what that sentence means in real life. Has he been chopped up into little pieces, for example?
It probably means they he’s just going through the Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation System to get back to DC, which is notorious for 1) taking forever, 2) involving crazy routes due to the way the flights are scheduled, 3) being a miserable experience for the prisoners
That is, it’s another case of an 1/6 insurrectionist acting like it’s unfair they’re being treated the same way every other federal prisoner gets treated.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: there are policy changes we could make that would stop private equity from buying millions of homes and then charging extortionary rents. But we have to make them before Private Equity owns $Trillions in housing. At that point they bribe lobby governments to keep new construction starts low and squeeze tenants even harder.
Basically, the flights start out in their hub in Oklahoma City and make a big loop through a number of other prisons before returning to where it started. If your depature or arrival point is part way through the loop, you can end up getting held overnight at multiple stops along the route. And if your prison isn’t on a route, you also get held while being bussed to and from the closest prison that is.
@Teve: I think that horse has already jumped the fence in many cities. (This has been episode 782 of “Things Cracker Hopes He’s Wrong About,” tune in again next time.)
For a Republican crowd? Large tax cuts, broad environmental regulatory rollback, a judiciary with philosophical leanings much more inclined to rein in the regulatory agencies in the future, the fastest development of a pair of vaccines for a pandemic ever.
It’s not like many of us are saying, “Oh, the Trump administration accomplished nothing, we’re in just as good a place as we were in Jan 2017.” Particularly on a regulatory front, the Biden administration is going to spend two years trying to undo Trump’s stuff, in a much more hostile judicial environment.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
No, because while Trump gave the go-ahead for a vaccine, Fauci and his cadre of globalist deep staters fiendishly substituted the Gates/Soros microchip-sterilizing agent-DNA-altering “biological” substance.
I’ll never watch Fox News’s new comedy show with Greg Gutfield, but I did just watch a 20 minute segment where John Lovett and Emily Heller watched a few clips from the show and then commented on it, and good God it was awful.
@Mister Bluster: Masochism Tango. Maybe sometimes it’s funny in songs. In real life not so much.
It’s always funny in songs. In real life it might not be funny but it is always instructive. The shit I’ve seen… Hell, the shit I’ve been thru. None of us are immune.
@Teve:
And as Cracker can confirm, as a wee lad I was subjected to both polio vaccines. My maternal grandmother (who with her bachelor brothers raised me) contracted polio at age 17 (while pregnant with my oldest uncle). She used crutches her entire adult life, and by God, her grandson was going to take the vaccine. What, we’ve got two? Great, he’s getting both – get back in that line, Luddite!
“For a middle aged guy whose never been arrested before this has been a shock for him,”
…
Webster, 54, is a retired New York City Police officer and former Marine who at times performed high-profile duties in his career—including working perimeter security at City Hall and the New York mayoral residence, according to News 4.
Oh gods, this is going to be SOOOOOO much fun watching him do time in a Federal correctional facility. Former LEO, in fed prison? Despite the recommended sentencing guidelines, I estimate he’ll last about 90 minutes in, oh say, Huntsville. Unless he can get straight into secure protected custody with the pedophiles and snitches. Then he may last a week. Maybe. Those snivelers didn’t last more than a week in general population where I did time, most fed prisons are way rougher,
Sick puppy that I am, I’d borrow an NFL sky-cam or two to cover his time, and sell it as a PPV. But then again, I’m (at best) a sick puppy.
@Kurtz: No, but I’m willing to listen to any rationalization for an increase of almost 52 times the original selling price. If you’d rather lament that it’s so sad the blue collar wages didn’t keep up with the market; perhaps blue collar workers should have upgraded their skills, I’ll be less interested, though.
@Mister Bluster: Yeah. I’ve never heard a funny Lenny Bruce schtick (and this one wasn’t the first, either), but I’m a tough audience for stand up–as I noted earlier in the week.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Any stand-up that does hit your funny bone on a consistent basis? I mentioned in the sleep discussion that Mike Birbiglia is one of those for me.
You can yell “fire” in a crowded theatre if you’re on stage but don’t do it off stage. The theatre is make believe that’s where it’s at.
I figured out after four years why I got arrested so many times.
See what happened, it’s been a comedy of errors. Here’s how it happened.
I do my act at perhaps 11:00 o’clock at night and little do I know that 11:00 am the next morning, before the Grand Jury somewhere there’s another guy doing my act who’s introduced as Lenny Bruce in substance.
“Here he is Lenny Bruce” (in substance).
A peace officer who is trained for to recognize clear and present danger not make believe does the act. The Grand Jury watches him work and they go “that stinks”.
But I get busted! And the irony is that I have to go to court and defend his act! Lenny Bruce
@Just nutha ignint cracker: in 1950 there were fewer than 470,000 people in Seattle. Land was cheap. And 70 years ago Seattle didn’t have thousands of millionaires from Boeing, Microsoft, and Amazon.
You should know by now that latter explanation ain’t my bag. Indeed, if all blue collar workers “upgraded their skills” there would be a lot of construction workers with impressive degrees. I guess it could be cool to hear them argue about Dostoevsky, but it wouldn’t solve a housing crisis.
The bls.gov cpi inflation calculator spit it out as ~$120,000. Good illustration why classical economists didn’t think land fit into their framework.
The scandal that wasn’t: Republicans deflated as nation shrugs at Hunter Biden revelations
More Charlie Sykes:
As for Hunter’s book:
The book appears to be a well written and brutally honest portrayal of his descent into hell and return to the land of the living.
@OzarkHillbilly:
😀
@Teve: Gee, I wonder why?
Despair fuels the flames of young loyalist anger in Northern Ireland
Can you imagine Donald Trump caring about his kids that much? Of course you can’t.
@Teve: Pobrecito…
@Teve: I had such a moment with my youngest. Not quite as dramatic but every bit as searing. I’m not sure I could read the book. The fear never really goes away.
@OzarkHillbilly: Alcohol and drug addiction can be hideous, and I speak from experience. Hunter is fortunate to have Joe.
That Republican and FoxNews shitheads thought they could use this stuff to wreck Joe tells you all you need to know about them.
vaccine refusal will come at a cost to all of us
@Teve:
Trump said yesterday that the Covid-19 vaccine should be known as the “Trumpcine.”
I did not make this up.
@CSK:
So we compromise and call it vaccine against the Trump virus.
An interesting article on conspiracy theories:
“But Uscinski cites one major difference about this particular moment in time: Trump.
The former reality TV personality launched his political career in 2011 by touting racist claims that former President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. As a 2016 presidential candidate, Trump revived a disproved allegation about Muslims in New Jersey watching and celebrating as the twin towers came down on 9/11. That sort of rhetoric didn’t live on in a vacuum; there were 127 reported assaults committed against Muslims in 2016, the highest total since 2001.
“He wasn’t chasing your regular Republican,” Uscinski said. “He was chasing someone who was motivated by conspiracy theories and antiestablishment views.””
@Teve: If you can’t do the time, …
@gVOR08: “ if he had only done with the officer told him to do it he wouldn’t be in the situation he’s in”
😛
CCES data: “How important is religion in your life?”
link to chart
Good news.
@Moosebreath:
That was fascinating. Thanks.
@Teve:
Monetary costs are the least of my worries.
There’s the fact the virus will continue to circulate among unvaccinated people, and keep mutating to produce more variants. To lesser degree than it’s doing now, yes, because the number of people who won’t take a vaccine is relatively small. But it remains large enough that a variant could emerge that the current vaccines won’t deal with, or not as effectively.
BTW, we’ve been lucky so far that the deadliest contagious diseases are hard to catch, like AIDS and Ebola. that is, they are really hard to get through casual contact, like passing too close to someone on the street. While diseases that are easy to catch, like flu and COVID are far less dangerous (not saying COVID’s not dangerous, just not as dangerous as Ebola).
Eventually we’ll get a highly contagious disease that is also very deadly. Something like Smallpox or bubonic plague. the disgraceful performance of much of the West during the COVID pandemic doesn’t bode well for when that eventually happens.
@Kathy: i learned something new a few days ago. Did you know there are cases of asymptomatic Ebola? It’s only like 2-3% of people exposed, but it’s real.
@Kathy: Right. Covid is extremely transmissible, but not super-severe. “The Big One” that virologists and epidemiologists worry about is not here yet. But if this pandemic indicates how we’ll respond to The Big One, everyone outside Asia will be F’d in the A.
@Kathy:
A few months ago, there was an article by a genetic virologist outlining that there are a finite number of adaptions covid can make that could make it more contagious and/or make it more serious or deadly. IIRC the reasons revolve around how and which cells that the virus attacks. I’d take that as good long term news and to be cynical, the more hosts that exists to allow those adaptions to take place, the faster the virus can burn through its options.
Given that it is doubtful that we’ll reach herd immunity, even within individual nations or next best hope is that Covid-19 does burn through its genetic options and actually becomes the equivalent of the flu.
Time for the weekly check-in with Gateway Pundit!
Looks like the regular SNAFU.
linky
Three of their top four headlines are negative things about Black people. Not surprised.
@Teve:
Gee willickers, The Gateway Pundit is one of the authoritative news sources most often posted at Lucianne.com. Never mind that GP has to disappear about half its articles because they’re invented out of whole cloth.
From yesterday’s speech at Mar-a-Lago:
Trump on McConnell: “…this dumb son-of-a-bitch…”
McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao never said “thank you” to him.
Anthony Fauci is “full of crap.”
Mike Pence “disappointed” Trump.
Krystal Ball: The next housing crisis is here and the villains are exactly who you’d expect
@CSK: GP articles also have a big presence in creationist discussion forums, cuz dumb.
@Teve: There’s a similar percentage of people who simply don’t get infected by HIV regardless of the number of exposures.
@Teve:
One term which I believe was coined originally to describe creationist arguments is the Argument from Personal Incredulity. This is the fallacy where you reject a claim on the grounds that you cannot understand how it can possibly be true–e.g. I can’t understand how the eye could have evolved by Darwinian evolution, therefore it must have been created. There’s another example from the Sidney Powell quote above: Biden and Harris are the most pathetic candidates imaginable, therefore they could not possibly have won except through fraud. I’ve been seeing versions of this argument from Trumpists on a regular basis since the election, including the more common claim that Biden couldn’t have won since he “never left his bunker.”
The Argument from Personal Incredulity is not something only dumb people engage in; we all do it to some degree, some of the time (it’s related to confirmation bias). But it seems to be especially common among Trumpists (I have no idea what Powell herself believes, I’m talking about her audience), who are as a rule people completely incapable of introspection. They don’t just believe Biden was a uniquely pathetic candidate and that Trump was an awesome one, it is literally impossible for them to even conceptualize the notion that this analysis that’s been fed to them might be flawed. It is as self-evident to them as that the sun will rise tomorrow–and hell, I’ve probably engaged in more self-examination of that assumption than they’ve engaged with anything they believe in their entire lives.
@Teve:
There is a reason why Jim Hoft is know as The Dumbest Man On The Internet
@Teve:
In the summer of 2016, GP ran a piece claiming breathlessly that there would be a “black uprising” at promptly 7:30 p.m. the following day in major U.S. cities. Needless to say, this never happened. The article vanished. It later emerged that the sole source for the piece was a hoax email from a few years before.
I’ve never figured out if Hoft knows that most of what he prints is utter horseshit, and he doesn’t care, or if he believes it.
Maskless Florida woman who coughed on Pier 1 customer gets 30 days in jail
I guess crying MUH FREEDUMB didn’t work.
No, the GOP and the Dems Haven’t Actually Swapped Brains
Trigger Warning: The article leads with a big picture of Moscow Mitch.
Hmmm, to be honest, it’s not worth a read, but it was a good chance to post the trigger warning.
@Sleeping Dog:
No need.
According to an AOL headline, Trump has been administering vaccines to other Republican leaders.
“Trump jabs Pence, McConnell at private event in Florida”
@Kylopod: there are several logical fallacies that creationists engage in among their 500 to 600 common arguments. One of them is the fallacy of the undistributed middle.
Premise 1: Scientists are Atheists
Premise 2: Scientists are Darwinists
Conclusion: Darwinism is Atheistic
It’s not true of course, I have a friend who is both a PhD evolutionary biologist and a devout Christian.
They also like the Appeal to Consequences fallacy. “Evolution can’t be true, because if it is, my literal reading of the Book of Genesis is wrong.”
They make literally hundreds of terrible arguments:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html
@Sleeping Dog:
Thank You! That’s how it should be done. You don’t just spring that shit on innocent civilians.
@OzarkHillbilly:
One facet of the Nothern Ireland flare up not being reported on enough is that two of the big loyalist militas, the UDA and the UVF, were heavily involved in drug trafficking across the Irish Sea, and the Northern Ireland Protocol part of Brexit has strangled their supply lines, costing them a lot of income.
Way back in 1969 when I was allegedly in college there were four of us guys who rented a 2 bedroom house in town to save money and basically have a place to drink cheap beer, smoke dope and drop acid. $100/month. Even at that we couldn’t afford a phone when we first moved in. When we finally did it was a 2 party line in town. The cheapest service available.
It wasn’t long before one guy had his girlfriend over every night and I was sleeping on the living room couch.
This was an small old house with no insulation or storm windows and very thin interior walls. It got to be annoying when some of us were studying late at night and could hear them…well…you get the picture. Pretty soon love turned sour and the real life daytime soap opera would start. Endless screaming and yelling. Then we heard what turned out to be the goldfish bowl, Little Goldie, water and all hit the wall after it bounced off someones head. Later there was the distinct sound of punches being thrown. Then they would both come out to the living room and show us their bruises and battle scars “See where he hit me!” “See where she hit me!”
Before they found a place of their own and moved out they were literally beating each other with cast iron cookware.
Masochism Tango. Maybe sometimes it’s funny in songs. In real life not so much.
@Teve:
Their is no barrier to holding devout religious beliefs and believing in science including evolution. One need only believe that at some point in evolutionary development, god inserted in humans, a soul or holy spirit, whatever you want to call it. The existence or non-existence of God is unprovable, making belief an article of faith.
There is a barrier, if your belief requires literal interpretation of bible, koran or torah.
@Sleeping Dog:..One need only believe that at some point in evolutionary development, god inserted in humans, a soul or holy spirit, whatever you want to call it.
Kinda’ like this.
A theory from the Trump Fan Club:
The vaccines aren’t actually vaccines. Dr. Fauci and the globalists conned Trump into thinking they were. They’re actually “bizarre biological injections” that will have very sinister after-effects.
@CSK: Wait–so now the “Trump Fan Club” is calling Trump a sucker?
@Teve: This would be the type of intervention that teh Trump family would have:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40HPFGvZ4ro
@Sleeping Dog:
“It’s hard to make predictions. Especially about the future.”
Nature, and biology in particular, has come nowhere near exhausting its capacity to surprise us. We can hope for the best, but we should still plan for the worst.
@Kylopod:
No. I think their belief is that he was just one lone man heroically waging a lonely battle against a government full of of deep-state globalists.
@Kylopod:
It’s funny, GP can post things that are baldly de-contextualized facts and plainly editorialize in a headline, and yet convince readers that “the MSM” is biased and avoids stories that disrupt their narrative.
Another funny thing, posters like the recent one who defended the voter fraud narrative, then when faced with evidence shifted to a perception-based argument routinely misuse fallacies and common specific sources of error like confirmation bias.
I suspect it’s easy to track phrases, in both Left and Right ecosystems, to a recent widely publicized source. But almost everyone maintains that they think for themselves.
@Sleeping Dog: yeah the scientists and philosophers I’ve known who are Christians consider that Ken Ham-style biblical literalism to be simple-minded nonsense.
@Mister Bluster:
Yeah, like that!
@CSK: yeah the so-called “vaccines” will mutatify all your DNAs! 😮
@senyordave:
Well, they sound like Trump.
@Teve:
Or sterilize you or implant a tracking chip in you. Whatever.
Reactions to the Former Guy’s speech at the R grifter meeting.
No need to follow the link, that’s the essential.
@Teve: The major problem with being poor and being in jail is that in both cases you don’t get to choose your neighbors.
Had to turn off All Things Considered. They were in rural Tennessee talking to
dumb dipshits‘Vaccine Resisters’ and I made it through the guy who said, “I don’t need a vaccine, I’m healthy, and I don’t trust…well I’m just Anti-Vaxx to be honest.” But I had to switch it off when the lady said, “Now, I’m not against the vaccine cuza Trump, we all voted for Trump but we wuz gonna get the vaccine, but then our family doctor died of Covid, and who’s to say it weren’t the vaccine that killed him?” and I spent the rest of the drive in blissful quiet.@Teve: “According to Weiner, Webster is currently being detained in different facilities around the country as he awaits to face charges in D.C.”
I wish I understood what that sentence means in real life. Has he been chopped up into little pieces, for example? If so, how is he going to be able to stand trial? Are prosecutors doing that thing they always talk about on L & O where an arrestee is transferred from one precinct to another, one holding facility to another, Rikers and back, whatnot, for the purpose of preventing him from receiving adequate counsel and/or delay him making bail? (If the second, is this the message we want to send about the importance of process, rule of law, quality of the justice system?) Adding “around the country” to the mix makes it seem like an abuse of both process and government funds. Very confusing.
@CSK: @Kathy: If either one of those moves will increase the aggregate number of vaccinated persons, fine, I can live with it. I doubt that dough heads that are rejecting the vaccine would take Trumpcine either, though.
@Sleeping Dog:
That would have been a talk about nothing.
@Teve: The Seattle home I grew up in–which sold to a single-income blue collar family in 1952 for a whopping $12,000, sold last last June for $620,000. Ms. Ball is preaching to the choir. But change is not going to come until some other nation is able to take over as the economic powerhouse that supports itself by self-financing its own deficits because letting the current house of cards fall destroys the world as we know it. If the US government were to fail economically, subsistence agriculture would become the new global standard of wealth because subsistence farmers can eat–which will be more than most of the world would be able to say.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
It probably means they he’s just going throught the Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation System to get back to DC, which is notorious for 1) taking forever, 2) involving crazy routes due to the way the flights are scheduled, 3) being a miserable experience for the prisoners
That is, it’s another case of an 1/6 insurrection acting like it’s unfair they’re being treated the same way every other federal prisoner gets treated.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
It probably means they he’s just going through the Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation System to get back to DC, which is notorious for 1) taking forever, 2) involving crazy routes due to the way the flights are scheduled, 3) being a miserable experience for the prisoners
That is, it’s another case of an 1/6 insurrectionist acting like it’s unfair they’re being treated the same way every other federal prisoner gets treated.
@Mister Bluster: “Maybe sometimes it’s funny in songs. In real life not so much.”
Isn’t that the case with a lot of satire though?
@Just nutha ignint cracker: there are policy changes we could make that would stop private equity from buying millions of homes and then charging extortionary rents. But we have to make them before Private Equity owns $Trillions in housing. At that point they
bribelobby governments to keep new construction starts low and squeeze tenants even harder.@Stormy Dragon:
Basically, the flights start out in their hub in Oklahoma City and make a big loop through a number of other prisons before returning to where it started. If your depature or arrival point is part way through the loop, you can end up getting held overnight at multiple stops along the route. And if your prison isn’t on a route, you also get held while being bussed to and from the closest prison that is.
@Stormy Dragon: Thank you. That helped, but I can see why no one would want to admit that’s what was happening.
@Teve: I think that horse has already jumped the fence in many cities. (This has been episode 782 of “Things Cracker Hopes He’s Wrong About,” tune in again next time.)
@Kathy:
For a Republican crowd? Large tax cuts, broad environmental regulatory rollback, a judiciary with philosophical leanings much more inclined to rein in the regulatory agencies in the future, the fastest development of a pair of vaccines for a pandemic ever.
It’s not like many of us are saying, “Oh, the Trump administration accomplished nothing, we’re in just as good a place as we were in Jan 2017.” Particularly on a regulatory front, the Biden administration is going to spend two years trying to undo Trump’s stuff, in a much more hostile judicial environment.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
No, because while Trump gave the go-ahead for a vaccine, Fauci and his cadre of globalist deep staters fiendishly substituted the Gates/Soros microchip-sterilizing agent-DNA-altering “biological” substance.
I’ll never watch Fox News’s new comedy show with Greg Gutfield, but I did just watch a 20 minute segment where John Lovett and Emily Heller watched a few clips from the show and then commented on it, and good God it was awful.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:..satire…
I confess that I have laughed at some outrageous acts over the years.
@Stormy Dragon: I am shocked, shocked I tell you!!!
It’s always funny in songs. In real life it might not be funny but it is always instructive. The shit I’ve seen… Hell, the shit I’ve been thru. None of us are immune.
And therein lies the problem. People with faith cannot accept a difference of opinion.
@Kathy: A very short conversation.
@Teve:
ICWYDT. Progress!
@OzarkHillbilly:..None of us are immune.
Funny Songs!?!?!
@OzarkHillbilly:
Not all, but far too many.
@Mister Bluster:
No matter how often I see that, I always laugh.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Have you plugged that into an inflation calculator?
@Michael Cain:
Oh, trump did plenty. None of it positive.
@CSK:..laugh
The costumes that the female dancers wore had me in stitches!
Pretzel tits! Can’t eat just one!
(Apologies to George Carlin)
@Teve:
And as Cracker can confirm, as a wee lad I was subjected to both polio vaccines. My maternal grandmother (who with her bachelor brothers raised me) contracted polio at age 17 (while pregnant with my oldest uncle). She used crutches her entire adult life, and by God, her grandson was going to take the vaccine. What, we’ve got two? Great, he’s getting both – get back in that line, Luddite!
@Mimai:
For the strikethrough or for turning off the radio?
If it’s the latter…there is a fine line between trying to understand other people and self-torture.
@Kurtz:
The former. Not that I view the latter as problematic. Indeed, I’m not advocating for relentless self-injurious behavior.
@Teve:
Oh gods, this is going to be SOOOOOO much fun watching him do time in a Federal correctional facility. Former LEO, in fed prison? Despite the recommended sentencing guidelines, I estimate he’ll last about 90 minutes in, oh say, Huntsville. Unless he can get straight into secure protected custody with the pedophiles and snitches. Then he may last a week. Maybe. Those snivelers didn’t last more than a week in general population where I did time, most fed prisons are way rougher,
Sick puppy that I am, I’d borrow an NFL sky-cam or two to cover his time, and sell it as a PPV. But then again, I’m (at best) a sick puppy.
@Kurtz: No, but I’m willing to listen to any rationalization for an increase of almost 52 times the original selling price. If you’d rather lament that it’s so sad the blue collar wages didn’t keep up with the market; perhaps blue collar workers should have upgraded their skills, I’ll be less interested, though.
@CSK: Sounds like a reasonable assumption to me.
(And why is there no eyeroll emoji available here?)
@Mister Bluster: Yeah. I’ve never heard a funny Lenny Bruce schtick (and this one wasn’t the first, either), but I’m a tough audience for stand up–as I noted earlier in the week.
@Sleeping Dog: Thank you! Now I don’t have to do a less well presented dissent to Ozark.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Any stand-up that does hit your funny bone on a consistent basis? I mentioned in the sleep discussion that Mike Birbiglia is one of those for me.
@Teve:
Religion is extremely important in my life — other people’s religions keep screwing up my life.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: in 1950 there were fewer than 470,000 people in Seattle. Land was cheap. And 70 years ago Seattle didn’t have thousands of millionaires from Boeing, Microsoft, and Amazon.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
You should know by now that latter explanation ain’t my bag. Indeed, if all blue collar workers “upgraded their skills” there would be a lot of construction workers with impressive degrees. I guess it could be cool to hear them argue about Dostoevsky, but it wouldn’t solve a housing crisis.
The bls.gov cpi inflation calculator spit it out as ~$120,000. Good illustration why classical economists didn’t think land fit into their framework.
@Teve: Thanks! I’ll take comfort in knowing that there’s a reasonable explanation for why working class families live in tents and cars.