Sometimes all you can do is try to make a positive difference in a world of criminal awfulness. Maybe it’s not enough, but it’s better than nothing. From Slate:
When a grand jury decided not to charge police officer Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown just over two weeks ago, the aftershocks of the decision wreaked havoc on the Ferguson community. Pubic schools closed and stores shuttered their windows as protesters took to the streets in the tumultuous aftermath. Throughout it all, however, the Ferguson public library remained open as scheduled.
In the two weeks since the grand jury decision, individuals from around the country looking to help in some way began donating money and books to the Ferguson Municipal Public Library. Social media helped spread the word, and on Monday Ferguson library director Scott Bonner announced the library had received more than $350,000 in contributions. The two-week total nearly matched the library’s annual budget…
On a different hot news topic, Brendan Nyhan, at the NYTimes Upshot blog:
… Most accounts of sexual assault never reach this level of awareness, however. Few are even reported. One reason is that reporting systems on college campuses and in the criminal justice system are widely regarded as unfriendly to victims. In particular, even though research suggests that many rapists engage in repeated attacks, survivors of sexual assault are rarely aware of other victims or able to come forward together.
Callisto, an online sexual assault reporting system under development by a nonprofit called Sexual Health Innovations, aims to change this and provide better options for victims of sexual assault on college campuses…
Ms. Ladd describes Callisto as meeting the need for reporting systems that “keep the survivor in control of their own data and their own choices.” According to the organization, it will allow users to create time-stamped reports that are saved in the system, which is not accessible to administrators or law enforcement. Users may choose to submit a report to campus authorities immediately or store the information and return to it later once they have made a choice about whether to report. Most notably, users are provided with the option to automatically submit their report if another student reports being attacked by the same person, creating shared awareness of a possible serial perpetrator who might otherwise not be identified to campus authorities…
And touching a third horrible topic, Kevin Cullen in the Boston Globe:
Last Thursday, not long after the funeral for his wife’s grandmother, a Boston lawyer named Michael Mone stepped outside a restaurant in Amsterdam, N.Y., to talk on his cellphone with his client, Ali Hussain Shaabaan.
Thirteen years ago, when Shaabaan was 19, he was detained as he tried to cross from Afghanistan into Pakistan. The border guards handed him over to the US military and collected a very nice bounty. He got shipped to the prison in Guantanamo, where some guy he doesn’t know claimed all sorts of things about Shaabaan: that he was a terrorist from Syria, that he came to Afghanistan to wage jihad, that he fought with Osama bin Laden in the mountains at Tora Bora, that he trained to be a suicide bomber. It was a great story, except there wasn’t a shred of evidence, just the word of some shady guy who claims to have the dirt on about half the guys ever held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
“You’re getting out,” Mike Mone told Ali Hussain Shaabaan. “Sunday.”
Shaabaan probably didn’t believe him, but he signed off, saying goodbye the way Mone always ended their meetings: “I’ll see you on the other side.” The other side was the airport at Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, where Mike Mone was waiting when Ali Shaabaan walked off a plane, a free man…
Mone has argued for years that the case against Shaabaan was the fantasy of a guy who would tell his captors anything they wanted to hear and then some. Shaabaan was cleared for release five years ago, but he lingered in Guantanamo because he’s from Syria, and if he went back to Syria he’d probably be killed. He has no intention of going back, Mone says. He’s learning Spanish.
“There’s no evidence he did anything wrong,” said Mone. “In fact, I just saw a letter the US government gave the Uruguayans, admitting they had no evidence that he did anything wrong, that he was involved in any terrorist activities.”
Jerry Cohen, another Boston lawyer, and Buz Eisenberg, a lawyer in Greenfield, say the same thing about their client, a Palestinian named Mohammed Abdullah Taha Mattan. Mattan, 35, and Shaabaan were among six longtime Guantanamo detainees who were resettled in Uruguay on Sunday…
***********
Apart from looking on the bright side, what’s on the agenda for the day?
OzarkHillbilly
It is nice to begin a day with a smile or 2.
Mustang Bobby
I’m struggling to learn my lines for the one-act play I’ve been roped into acting in. It should be simple because I wrote the play, too, but now I remember why I quit acting in the first place: I hated learning lines.
OzarkHillbilly
Oh, and Jose Mujica has long been a hero of mine.
NotMax
Just because.
Just around the corner
There’s a rainbow in the sky
So let’s have another cup of coffee
And let’s have another piece of pie
mtiffany
Jibbers Crabst, Morning Blow is trotting out all the ratfuckers this morning and giving them a platform to spew more of their bullshit. It’s really fucking awesome though, because suddenly the Morning Blowbots have just discovered this thing called ‘context’ and they are informing us that we have to remember the ‘context’ in which all the decisions regarding torture were made.
OzarkHillbilly
@mtiffany: Yeah. The context was cowardice.
Mustang Bobby
@mtiffany: Yeah, that’s the same framing they used to intern the Japanese during World War II and just about anything else that goes beyond the pale. They can call it “context” all they want, but it’s revenge, pure and simple.
Mustang Bobby
@OzarkHillbilly: That too.
NotMax
@Mustang Bobby
Was appearing in The Owl and the Pu**ycat a long, long time ago in a reality far, far away. A lengthy scene was just myself and one other actor.
One night, somehow we both simultaneously managed to skip ahead three or four pages in the middle of that scene and each of us could tell the other knew it. We managed to double back and do all the dialogue, slightly altering lines where necessary to have it make sense, without the audience being aware of anything out of the ordinary.
(Second attempt at posting, The asterisks speak for themselves.)
Mustang Bobby
@NotMax: In high school I played the preacher in Dark of the Moon and went completely dry in one scene. I didn’t have the presence of mind to improv so I just stood there like a fencepost until someone off-stage threw me a cue like a brickbat. That’s about the time I started exploring playwriting.
JPL
It’s a bad day to stream, Morning Joe. Hayden is on defending his role. (Before it’s mentioned, it’s never a good day to stream Morning Joe)
The NY Times has an oped piece by Eric Fair who tortured at Abu Ghraib. link
Patricia Kayden
That last story is so shocking. Arresting, wrongfully detaining and probably torturing innocent people for what exactly? How does this make American safer? It’s sad that even Democrats have worked against President Obama to prevent the closure of Guantanamo Bay and the transfer of prisoners to the mainland. I hope President Hilary Clinton plans to do something about this travesty.
JPL
@Mustang Bobby: You’ll do fine.
Patricia Kayden
@mtiffany: The context being an unnecessary war in Iraq? Right?
bemused
@Mustang Bobby:
Revenge, yeah, but I’ve always thought that was just a handy excuse for sadists to be able to enjoy inflicting a lot of pain and suffering on others “legally”.
mtiffany
Sweet Zombie Jesus, now I remember why I can only watch MSNBC four hours a day (2-3, 4-5, and 8-10)…
Schlemazel
@NotMax:
I had a part-time job as a projectionist in a small town theater at the time “The French Connection” was out. I had to watch that movie twice a night for several nights & grew to hate it. But I noticed that there are 2 car chase scenes in it under the elevated railroad bridges and both overlapped reels. I found that I could eliminate the parts between the 2 chases without anyone noticing. It certainly didn’t hurt the movie any.
JPL
@Patricia Kayden: At least he didn’t freeze to death. I’m sickened that Hayden and the torture deniers get a forum on MSM. Hayden needs to be kidnapped and dropped in Syria.
Mustang Bobby
I’m all in favor of the proposal put forward by Anthony D. Romero of the ACLU to grant a presidential pardon to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the rest of the gang that authorized and facilitated torturing people. Make it a full and free pardon, too, and make sure that they take it without coercion or threat. They don’t even have to confess to the crimes or admit guilt; by accepting the pardon, they’re doing that anyway.
The only condition I’d impose is that they leave the country. They can take their wives and families; they can even keep their pension. Just get out and go somewhere far, far away and never come back.
Kay
I think this is a horrible idea. Prosecution of what are alleged criminal acts are not victim versus perpetrator, they are state versus perpetrator. That’s because a crime is an offense against ALL of us.
It’s just the wrong direction. I think they want to get away from the idea that this is a personal offense against one woman, not play into that. It’s a false promise to tell victims they will remain in control when they report a crime. No, they won’t. That isn’t how the criminal justice system works and that’s deliberate and necessary.
I feel like we’re making the same mistakes we made with child abuse 30 years ago. Victims are important. They should be heard. They should have all the aid and help they need. But, they shouldn’t be put in a position where this becomes about them instead of all of us. It won’t “empower” them at all. It changes the whole dynamic and goes in exactly the wrong direction, making this personal and individual, which leaves them more vulnerable, not less.
BillinGlendaleCA
@JPL: I turned off Shmoe after the first segment. Hayden? Why do I want to listen to a war criminal?
As for my agenda for the day; I’ll be continuing to refine my home automation programs. Almost all my lights can now be remotely controlled.
Elizabelle
Happy news: the Omaha sheep on the lam in a festive holiday sweater has been reunited with his owner.
Sheep, name of Gage and leash-trained, “shares a shed with two chickens, when he isn’t in his owner’s house.”
No word on how the chickens are attired.
mtiffany
The more I watch that shitshow the more I understand why David Icke could come up with that reptilian alien theory of his — the Morning Blowbots are completely inhuman in their lack of humanity — and it’s totally borne of the knowledge and certainty that THEY will never be subjected to such depraved treatment.
JPL
@BillinGlendaleCA: After listening to the deniers on CBS Evening news last night, I decided to try Today show this morning. I had to walk out of the room but that was after Savannah Guthrie, had Hayden’s eyes twitching with her questions. I walked out when she gave him a forum to explain.
He perjured himself and rather than on MSM, he should be behind bars. The twitching eyes were fun to watch though.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay: It also makes the system about vengeance, not justice.**
** I know, I know, the system has always been about vengeance, but that should not be our stated goal.
Elizabelle
@Kay: Well said.
JPL
The CIA was given the name of Osama’s carrier before torture. They discounted the name because torture caused the name to recanted. In other words, they believed the information they got from torture. How can they now say, see it works.
Iowa Old Lady
@mtiffany: The disturbing nature of some “contexts” is why torture is against the law. That’s supposed to take judgment calls out of it and save you from yourself. Apparently not.
Kay
@OzarkHillbilly:
One of the things that “state versus perpetrator” does is it puts the victim in a huge group of people. They’re “us”. It makes it less about the victim’s behavior and character and more about the perpetrator and the act. That’s where the focus should be.
They just saw how putting the entire burden on the victim played out, with the “Jackie” story. It’s a bad idea. Was “Jackie” in control of her information and story? I guess! How “empowered” is she feeling about now?
If they want the focus to be on the perpetrator and the acts they should probably stop making the entire focus the individual victim. They can’t get where they want to go this way.
satby
@Kay: I agree. But no surprise, it seems backwards is the preferred direction on a lot of things these days.
Kay
@OzarkHillbilly:
I think it’s part of the reason we end up with this crazy conflating and muddling everything up, where we end up evaluating the victim. “Was the kid who got shot by the cop a good person?” It doesn’t matter. At all. WE object to cops shooting kids. The public.
danielx
Nice to see some semi-good news this morning, after what seems like continuous torment for the last few ye- er, weeks. Other good news: firewood delivery this morning, yay! Purely curious as to what other BJers pay for firewood, inasmuch as it’s costing me $110 for a full rick (cord? 4 x 4 x 8, more or less) delivered. I live in a metro area; if I lived even forty miles outside the city it would probably be somewhere in the neighborhood of half that price although I might have to pick it up myself. Which would be a challenge inasmuch as I don’t have a pickup truck or trailer, more’s the pity. I’m becoming increasingly convinced there’s a pickup truck in my future.
OT, earlier thread: Chuck C. Johnson really is a noxious little asshole, isn’t he? I’ve come to suspect that he and James O’Keefe are twin sons of different mothers. Tucker Carlson may be attempting to distance himself now, but clearly he’s found Johnson the Ginger Tool to be a useful tool in the past. Which should come as no surprise, considering Tucker’s own claims to toolhood. I don’t like to generalize, but I would like to put forth a proposition: any man who voluntarily wears a bow tie under any circumstances other than a formal occasion, involving formal wear, is by definition a douche rocket.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay:
The thing about rape is, it’s only half of us, which somehow or other always translated into a certain amount of “blaming the victim” because of how she was dressed, the neighborhood she was in, her state of intoxication, what hour she was out and about, etc. What happened with “Jackie” is what some always try to do with every rape victim.
Mustang Bobby
@danielx:
The exceptions being Bill Nye the Science Guy and Mr. Peabody.
Kay
@OzarkHillbilly:
I agree but the way to make it less about “half of us” is probably not to make it more about half of us, or one of us.
I just see this everywhere. I was listening to one of the torture excusers, and she’s relying on the victims of 9/11 to make her case. It’s a horrible approach to policy. It never ends anywhere good. Never. Now we’re making national policy based on the “good people” and the “bad people”. Victims don’t have to be good people and perpetrators aren’t evaluated based on inherent goodness or badness. Some of the torture excusers say it straight out. “These are bad people”. All of them, some of them, just in general, what? I mean, you’re off to the races! Who knows where that ends up.
danielx
@Mustang Bobby:
Granted. Perhaps I should have said Republican man, since another bow tie wearer (by choice), at least some of the time, is none other than George Will. Yet another well known douche rocket…I’m certain that Bill Nye isn’t a Republican, and I’m pretty sure about Mr. Peabody.
geg6
Well, it was nice watching Village Princess Nora take it to the CBS special correspondent on national security and war criminal former CIA deputy director who was lying and spinning and pretty much get hysterical at her questions on the CBS morning show this morning. She got the last word all as Charlie Rose sat looking pained at her challenge to his character. I was rather astonished, I must say. Maybe Catholic guilt on her part? Who knows? But that has been the hardest pushback I’ve seen in the MSM, albeit weaker than I would hope.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay:
Oh yeah… This past weekend at a small family gathering I realized that I have become the cranky Uncle/brother that you can’t talk politics with because… because I am just so tired of the bullsh!t and won’t quietly accept it anymore. Because most of my family is in north STL county the inevitable conversation about Michael Brown and Ferguson came up.
My question to all was, “So jaywalking is now a capitol crime?”
And the answer was, “He stole a box of cigars too!”
Which just incensed me. “So petty thievery is now a capitol crime?”
It went downhill from there until my SIL said, “Not appropriate conversation with children around!” which I thought it was an entirely appropriate conversation to have in the presence of children, a needed conversation. Never did get around to discussing what Darren Wilson did and was and is.
Sigh… I love them all but dayum they are a bunch of boneheads
Elizabelle
@Kay:
I thought the RS writer could have done an interesting article on the culture of rape victim support that’s grown up on UVa, a campus community with an alcohol and rape problem. (I include alcohol because the frats are allowed to serve it, hence their popularity in attracting students to party. Sororities are not allowed to serve.)
I was a bit disturbed by the victim advocates who pretty much helped support not reporting rapes to the police. So the rapists and assaulters continue on.
It’s not all about the victim, very honestly.
TomG
Never forget, in regards to the third story, that Liz Cheney was one of those despicable un-American cowards who said many times that any lawyer defending prisoners in Guantanamo Bay was a terrible traitor. Here’s one of many articles about this:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/mar/11/liz-cheney-keep-america-safe
The apple didn’t fall far from the tree in this case.
OzarkHillbilly
@danielx:
4x4x8 is a cord, a rick is one third of that: 16″ deep by 4′ high by 8′ long. I pay about $4.72 in gas and 2 cycle oil… and a couple days worth of labor cutting, splitting, and hauling it to the wood shed.
Valdivia
@geg6:
I don’t watch any of the Village on tv but it was good to see, at least on Twitter yesterday, that a bunch of them had to contend or come to terms with the reminder of exactly what Bush was like and what those years were like. After having their panties in a twist over HEALTHCARE for 6 years quite the contrast to face actual criminal activity by the gov! They should all be ashamed.
Glad to hear someone is pushing back.
Tommy
@OzarkHillbilly: I thought I was that cranky uncle/brother until this Thanksgiving with the extended family my brother married into. I assumed I’d have to be that “guy” that defended Michael Brown and more than ready for the task. But as the conversation turned to Ferguson, and of course we were only a few miles from it as this happened, but I didn’t have to argue at all. It was common agreement what happened was wrong. Very wrong.
I have to admit I was stunned, but in a good way. My happy story for the day.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay:
Oooooh! Oooooh! I know! I know! Me! Call MEEEE!!!!
Muslims are horrible bloodthirsty cultists and we need to just kill them all.
Betty Cracker
@danielx: We can get a full pickup truckload of wood for $25. We have to load and unload it ourselves, in our own truck though. And drive way out in the boonies to get it.
OzarkHillbilly
@Tommy: My happy news for the day:
The letter is among 5,000 searchable documents from the first 44 years of Einstein’s life, which go online free on Friday in their original German and in English translation….
More volumes will be added to the collection as they are printed.
“We want to make everything accessible to a much wider audience than just the scholars, historians, physicists and philosophers,” said Diana Kormos-Buchwald, director of the Einstein Papers Project.
bemused
@Tommy:
That is good news…progress!
Tommy
@Elizabelle: It is about the community, as little as I know. I was the president of my frat and the topic of rape came up in the late 80s. A woman told another person she was raped at a party we held. Folks got mad at me, because the first thing I did was call the police. Not the campus police. The Macomb IL police. I will admit part of it was to protect our frat, but a much larger part was I didn’t want women raped at our parties. And to a larger extended I didn’t want to share a roof with a person that would rape a person.
Because people here are curious I still don’t know what happened exactly. The women didn’t press charges. But the guy in question was basically excoriate from us and not really heard from again. As I said later, the ladies boyfriend that accused the guy later got vetted by the FBI and became an agent, I tend to think he (and she) wasn’t making shit up.
danielx
@OzarkHillbilly:
I hear you. I’m having trouble figuring out how they make any money, considering the time and gas for delivery. My sister and brother-in-law heat their home with wood (save for when temp dips into single digits) and I’ve helped him split and stack wood. The labor involved is an asskicker even with a gas splitter, especially if you’re trying to split up stuff that’s three feet in diameter. Easy to get hurt.
Kay
@Elizabelle:
I’m offering advice that maybe they don’t want, but we have some history here with both child abuse and domestic violence which are both hard to prove and have traumatized victims and a hugely personal and societal bias element. A focus that is solely on the victim fails. It worked better when we made it a societal problem rather than a victim problem.
I think the “black lives matter” activists have it right. That takes it away from an individual “is he worthy of not being shot?” type analysis. They are demanding what they want: state and public recognition of the offense which is against all of us.
FlipYrWhig
Is someone in the TV/media complex eventually going to realize that another eentsy weentsy problem with torture from the instrumental standpoint (rather than the moral one) is that sometimes the guy being tortured actually doesn’t know anything? It seems like all the defenses start from the notion that you have a dangerous terrorist hiding something so OF COURSE you’d inflict pain on him. But sometimes, maybe a lot of the time, the guy that you’re inflicting pain on is just some dude, NOT a dangerous terrorist hiding something. And now what have you done?
Tommy
@OzarkHillbilly: I didn’t know that. I just reread Einstein Dreams for the fourth time. It is hard to explain. Written by a guy that is a physicist, but also the head of creative writing at MIT. In the book, with chapters of only a few pages each, he wonders what Einstein in 1905, when he worked in a patent office in Switzerland was dreaming when he was pondering the Theory of Relativity. It is mind warping.
If you have a friend or family member that likes science, or heck just books, get them this. The best book (and I’ve read a ton of them) I’ve read in the last 20 years.
Kay
@FlipYrWhig:
So much of this is about Bush people protecting their work and their inflated idea of their historical significance. It always made me nervous about them. It was always like they were simultaneously acting and watching themselves act In History.
I remember reading the wife of one of them, she’s some kind of DC person in her own right. She wrote this crazy essay after she had a baby. “This is a war baby“. It was repulsive, partly because it was complete bullshit: none of the Bush advisors sacrificed at all for the war(s) and neither did most of us, including me. Like she wanted to be part of Something Bigger and now she was.
OzarkHillbilly
@danielx: I split most of my wood with a maul and once a year I rent a log splitter for the stuff that is just impossible. I must be a sick man because I actually enjoy splitting it the old fashioned way. It is quiet with no sounds but the wind softly whistling thru the bare tree limbs, and the birds arguing over at the feeders and the thwack of the maul. I only do about a half hour at a time while I throw frisbee for the woofmeister but even that is enough to cripple my hands come the next morn.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay: They all have Daddy complexes, especially W. His daddy was a real pilot and was actually in a real war.
satby
@danielx:
I can tell you: a dollar at a time. Seriously, they’re bartering their time and labor for cutting up wood that they sourced for free out in the sticks for your money, they aren’t considering it a hugely profitable enterprise. It may be their only income, and it turns hours that wouldn’t pay anyway into ones that bring in a couple of dollars. I watch neighbors here in Michigassippi do that all the time. There’s nothing around here in the way of jobs but part time service or seasonal labor, so selling firewood, plowing, and Christmas trees is how a lot of them get through the winter.
And when I used to be a well paid corporate drone, I had forgotten how great it felt to have $25 more dollars than you had a minute ago; but when the alternative is zero, that $25 feels like a thousand.
Cervantes
@mtiffany:
Watching anything four hours a day sounds … like it could turn one into “Sweet Zombie Jesus.”
satby
@Cervantes: Yep. I have never felt healthier or less frenzied than when I went full Roku and cut TV back to one program a day at most (British mysteries, I just can’t quit them). Better for the brain, better for the blood pressure… just better for me.
danielx
@Betty Cracker:
Sounds about right. I’m becoming increasingly convinced I need a truck (as opposed to the pseudo-race-car I was contemplating a few months ago) because it’s a lot easier to haul tools and whatnot. Downside: people will call me all the time to help them haul stuff. Upside: I’ll be able to haul stuff. Plus if I buy something really big and ostentatious, like a Dodge Ram 1500 4×4 crew cab, I will be (ahem) twice as manly. So the advertising tells me; as with criminal bankers buying Porsches, so it is with shitkickers driving Dodge Ram trucks.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Would that I could attend Wavy Gravy’s one man show in NYC, wherein he relates the story of being taken for walks by Einstein at the ripe age of four.
bemused
@Kay:
“Acting and watching themselves act in history” definitely reminds me of the quotes of Bush aide some attribute to Karl Rove, “reality-based community isn’t the real world anymore…we create reality…we’re history’s actors…all of you will be left to just study what we do.”
They created a nightmarish reality.
Cervantes
@Kay:
I remember David “Axis of Evil” Frum writing about it — “My youngest daughter was born in December 2001: a war baby. When my wife nursed little Beatrice in the middle of the night, she’d hear F-16s patrolling the Washington skies.” and so on — but I don’t recall his wife (Danielle Crittenden) doing so.
Probably I’m forgetting the article you have in mind.
Amir Khalid
Apparently, the Eye of Sauron will not be looking out over Moscow after all. Do read the story to the end; it’s got a nice punchline.
OzarkHillbilly
@danielx:
Yes because nothing says “manly” quite like 12 mpg. :-(
Kay
@OzarkHillbilly:
Well, it’s what happened after too. They all went on with their lives and got (or remained) rich. They’re all pundits or slightly shady pundit/lobbyists or in some private sector job that they only got because they were in that administration.
I want a crawl under people opining on tv. I think the context would be really helpful for viewers. Who, exactly, pays these people and for what are they paid?
Tommy
@satby: I bought a freezer from Menards a few weeks ago. 5.1 size. $149 on the “black” sales weekend. Delivered it for $29.99. I talk to the delivery guy, because that is the shit I do, and he gets paid less than $10 per delivery. Plus mileage. He went on to say he owns his own truck, independent contractor, and pays his own insurance and maintenance on said truck. I ask him how he makes a living with this business model.
He said he works his ass off and never turns down a delivery. I tried to tip him and he refused the money. Said it was his job.
I actually sent an email to Menards saying you should hire this guy, and he wasn’t a spring chicken, to run your shipping. Best customer experience I’ve had in years and years. Guy would have broken off his arm to make me happy.
MomSense
I do understand why the President has to say that the Bush torture regime isn’t who we are as a nation because he has been/is unfortunately the person who has to repair all our diplomatic relationships.
People like Morning Ho and all the other pundits who enabled these atrocities, however, are just trying to cover their own complicity. The inconvenient truth is that torture is who we are–at least a good portion of us and it always has been. Genocide of native Americans, slavery, Jim Crow all demonstrate that there is a definite evil streak in our American experience.
MomSense
@Amir Khalid:
Wow, I’m forwarding that link to my kids. My son had a paper due yesterday in his philosophy class and over the weekend he asked me if that dude on balloon-juice had posted any more links.
danielx
@satby:
Exactly so.
I was a well paid corporate drone type for the better part of three decades, with occasional self employed consulting gigs. That all ended come 2009 and the crash. Which undoubtedly explains, at least partially, why I’d like to see various Wall Street/banker/home finance types (Angelo Mozilo and Richard Fuld, come on down!) smeared with honey and staked out on an anthill. Now I’m a painting contractor/handyman/software consultant, hey, I’ve become a Renaissance man! I make a whole lot less money, but value it a lot more – even when I’ve screwed the pooch on an estimate and end up making about ten bucks an hour. It’s honest and honorable work, although the benefits are nonexistent and at the end of the day I’m tired and achey and then have to put in brain sweat on some consulting gig…however, I don’t feel like I need to take a psychic bath at the end of the day, which I did on occasion when I dressed like a banker every day.
danielx
@OzarkHillbilly:
Hey, I didn’t say the shitkickers were smart.
mtiffany
@Cervantes: Sorry, those are the only four hours that I can watch without getting sick to my stomach, not that I do watch all four hours every day.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay: Agreed, It is what happened after. Those type of people are always allowed to go on with their lives while people like us have to live with the wreckage.
Cervantes
@mtiffany:
Most of it is nauseating, I agree.
A friend once observed that TV programs should come with a warning from the Surgeon General.
satby
@Tommy: That was nice of you. He was too proud to take a tip and that’s too bad, bet he could really have used it.
Us “not spring chickens” still work hard, and contribute, and will keep doing so. We have worked all our lives, most of us; and to be at the tail end of our working years with almost no security is something we never expected. That’s why the whole “play by the rules” thing has been falling flat. We did, and we have precious little to show for it sometimes.
One foot in front of the other. That’s what the wood splitters, veggie stand owners, Menards delivery guys, and crafters like me do. No one gets anywhere standing still and complaining.
.
satby
@danielx:
Amen brother! I’m paid poverty wages now but I sleep at night and help disabled people part time during the day. Beats the crap out of pretending to care about the “optics” of an impossibly spec’ed IT project slipping by a day or so.
Matt McIrvin
@Cervantes: It sounds kind of like James Lileks too, the way he’d use his love for his baby daughter as a lever for whatever grandiose thing he was trying to say about the sweep of history, the terrorist menace and the perfidy of liberals and the French.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
Kitty update: I took Keaton to the vet this morning and there doesn’t seem to be anything seriously wrong, although the poor guy is constipated once again, so now they’re going to get prescription food. I’m guessing that not being able to poop properly is affecting his mood just a tad.
Charlotte gets her checkup next week to make sure there’s nothing weird going on with her, but it does seem to be a sudden outbreak of Charlotte being territorial. Since it seemed to suddenly escalate after the Feliway plug-in ran out, the prescription is moar Feliway, more playtime, and making sure one cat (Charlotte) can’t block access to all of the litter boxes. Plus a new cat tower.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Kay:
Thanks, Kay. IANAL, but it sounded like an epically bad idea to me, so I’m glad to have some confirmation. :-)
satby
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Late to reply, but a cheaper way to get results without the “prescription pet food” (which I think is an absolute scam) is to buy tuna in oil and put it on whatever hairball formula version of food you normally give them until the constipation abates, then the hairball formula should take care of normal digestion because it’s higher in fiber. Not a lot at one time, but a little tuna with the oil from the can until normal elimination starts. Same effect as mineral oil on humans, but the cats like the tuna flavor so much they don’t mind.
Bob In Portland
You know how the CIA isn’t in Ukraine? Here, they’re flying the flag outside the building where they aren’t there.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@satby:
Keaton doesn’t like wet food. Or fish oil. Or tuna, really. That’s one if the reasons we’re in this mess. I’m a little worried about Blue Buffalo (there are odd rumors on the internet about possible contamination that are being stonewalled), so I’m willing to switch to the prescription food and see if it helps. If not, I may try the tuna thing.