Here’s a bit of contextually good news: President Trump’s last-ditch effort to remove civil service protections from tens of thousands of career federal employees appears to have lost steam, facing time constraints and legal hurdles as the administration prepares to leave office, officials said. This was to have been the finishing blow in Trump’s and …
May FSM Have Mercy On His Soul…
…Because I sure won’t. Sheldon Adelson is dead. My reaction to the news: No f**king nil nisi here. His major competition for most destructive asshole (not holding political office) of our time is Rupert Murdoch, with whom he kept common cause. When (apocryphally) the eulogist at Louis B. Meyer’s funeral asked “does anyone have anything …
Respite-ish Open Thread
A friend from college sent me this, and while it hurts too much to be all the way funny, I have to confess, dear reader… I laughed: I’ve got a longer post cooking about the fact that the GOP is the New Shimmer of politics: both the party of treason, and one that ideologically and …
A Good Guy With A Gun…
A tragedy occurred in Texas today: A pastor was killed and two people were injured in a shooting at a Texas church on Sunday…A suspect is in custody, Smith County Sheriff Larry Smith said. This was a classic story of a good guy with a gun…with a catastrophic rewrite to the ending many gun-advocates imagine …
Some More Thread
Seems we need a new thread for the halibut. So as not to flounder further (and to forestall carping from the cheap seats) here are a couple of pictures from an hour or so ago. It seems that some folks don’t think I should be working this evening: When I protested the intrusion, I got …
Let’s Talk About Cars…
Reading this morning’s thread I got caught up in the memories of pickups (vehicles, not attempts). In between thinking about the alternate history of the decline of the United States that can be read in the emergence of “luxury” light trucks and the pseuds who buy up to and more than six figures of rolling …
Respite: Magnets!
My brother the magpie sent me this old clip of Richard Feynman explaining that explaining why magnets repel or attract each other is not at all a simple matter: I saw this aeons ago, and had forgotten it, and am very glad to reencounter it. Because 2020, I can’t help hearing our current predicament …