Stream of Consciousness

How Did It Get So Broken

by John Cole| February 10, 20216:44 pm| 238 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Stream of Consciousness

If Senate Republicans fail to convict Donald Trump, it won't be because the facts were with him or his lawyers mounted a competent defense. It will be because the jury includes his co-conspirators.

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) February 10, 2021

Watching the GOP these days, I just don’t know what they are doing or how it got here. I mean we know how it got to this point, they got increasingly reliant on crazy people and catered to them more and more until they ate the party, but it’s still hard to understand how we got to this point.

If anyone asked me at gunpoint what the Republican Party believes in, the only thing I could say is basically the Republican Party. They’re basically a virus that exist only to replicate to continue existing. I can’t think of any other reason for it to be here, and that isn’t even really one.

While the trial is going on in the Senate, the cameras are, by rule, focused only on the speaker, because that is what the Republicans insisted. That way it won’t show them with their legs up on their desks, doing crosswords, fucking around on their electronic devices, and yukking it up with their fellow co-conspirators.

It’s all so depressing. There are so many things that frustrate me, but one that really grates on me is the absolute lack of vision. They aspire to literally nothing. They live only for the day. A little while ago, GM announced they would be moving to all electric cars in 2035 or something, which is great and something to aspire to. All my right-wing friends LOST THEIR SHIT.

Why do they fucking care? Does anyone think the internal combustion engine will be swept off the earth by 2035? I don’t. That ain’t happening in my lifetime, if for not other reason that the capacity to fuel every engine on earth with renewables will not yet be available. But even the idea of change for the better scares them. It’s insane.

It’s like people do not realize that the very car they are in right now, even if it is a shitty 1983 honda civic that is half bondo, is still better than the mode of transportation that 99.99999% of all humans had over the history of earth. If we are all electric in the future, it will only be because it is better and companies can make a profit on it. And probably in another 50-100 years, something will replace electric cars. And so on.

Like I said, it’s all so god damned depressing.

How Did It Get So BrokenPost + Comments (238)

(Ass) Blast From The Past

by ruemara| December 25, 20191:56 pm| 22 Comments

This post is in: Because of wow., Cat Blogging, Not Politics, Open Threads, Pet Blogging, Something Good Open Thread, Stream of Consciousness

Look at that face. Adorable, elegant, lovingly demanding. Let us step back to Hime’s first Christmas with the family.

There she is. A delicate little flower.

Brother Odoriki had the kitty snuffles when he was adopted, hence the booger snout. Hime was just naturally perfect. Or so I thought. So, on Christmas Day, Hime demonstrated she had a tender stomach. And a bad case of the runs. Worse, she was intimidated by the litterbox. And shadows, slight motions, a slight breeze. She was a complete coward about everything and still is Queen Jitters. After the 3rd cleanup of a poop spill outside the low box, I was determined that this time, I’d wait patiently and just help her keep her tiny butt in the giant litterbox.

This, of course, did not go well. It’s Christmas morning, I’ve been cleaning all week and the result of my frustrated attempt at kitten corralling was… a tiny white projectile spraying liquid shit across the linoleum, the carpeted downstairs, up the stairs and under the sofa.

I really wanted to cry. My lovely quiet Christmas was a fetid, poop garlanded mess. My housemate came down to see what the hubbub was about and managed to pin Herself. We looked at each other and just burst out laughing. Finally, after capturing the little biological weapon, I called my friend’s dad, who’s a large animal vet as well as the head of an NGO that teaches about zoonosis & husbandry in African countries, and drove her over for a Christmas freebie checkup. We cleaned EVERYTHING, including her butt and put her on very simple food for a day or so. The rest of Christmas was lovely, since she forgave her humans for daring to pen her and get her muddbutt checked out.

Yes, I was still finding little poop spots days later. But I feel very loved. Merry Not Stinky Christmas!

Merry Christmas To All & To All A Good Night

(Ass) Blast From The PastPost + Comments (22)

Whatever Blows Your Trumpet

by John Cole| November 12, 20183:50 pm| 160 Comments

This post is in: Stream of Consciousness

One of the things I hate about the anti-vaxxers is they make me feel like an authoritarian scumbag because I am infringing on their right to be idiots or whatever. I am totally fine with people being idiots, so long as their idiocy does not impact other people’s behavior. So if skipping vaccines hurt only you, that would be fine. You can drop dead if you want. But that’s not how it works, and when you refuse to be vaccinated because your healing crystals have you covered and blah blah blah Jenny McCarthy, you put other people at risk.

And it’s like that with so many things. Guns and drunk driving and meth come to mind. At heart, I’m really about letting people do what they want, just so long as it isn’t hurting anyone. It’s one of the reasons I have never understood why straight people give two hoots in hell what LGBTQ people do or who they sleep with or whether they get married, etc.

I’m also not SCIENCE UBER ALLES. I mean, I think from a policy perspective and 99% of the time in my personal choices, following the scientific evidence is the way to go. But hey, science also discusses the placebo effect, and science also doesn’t have answers for everything- yet. Which is why if people want to go to chiropractors, even though I think they are quacks, whatever. Same with cupping, and acupuncture, and other shit. Maybe it’s just the attention or touch from others that helps people. Maybe it makes them calmer in the head. I don’t know, but if it makes people happy and ISN’T HURTING ANYONE, again, whatever floats your boat.

Hell, I use CBD oil daily. There is, to my knowledge, no real scientific evidence that it works. But since I started a couple months ago, my knees and fingers feel better, and I have not woken up ONCE with a frozen shoulder, something that used to be an every night occurrence. I also think I am a little less anxious. It’s almost imperceptible, but when I lie down at night to fall asleep I just feel a little less, I dunno, worked up. Maybe something in the oil has made a change. Maybe I just think there is a difference because I am doing something about it. Maybe I started sleeping differently. Maybe I’m just nuts? Who knows? If it stops working or if I think it stops working, I’ll stop doing it. But I’m not hurting anyone or hurting myself, so, who cares.

That’s what we should be getting back to in this country, along with a renewed concern for our fellow man. We should start helping people more, and we should stop worrying about what kind of harmless other shit people are doing just because it irritates us. That’s another thing- these white women freaking out about a couple black kids in a pool somewhere. Maybe they aren’t supposed to be there. Maybe they are. WHY THE FUCK DO YOU CARE? It’s just some kids trying to not be fucking hot in the middle of summer. Leave them the fuck alone.

ehh whatever.

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I Hear There’s A Sporting Contest Today

by Tom Levenson| February 4, 20182:35 pm| 217 Comments

This post is in: Sports, Stream of Consciousness, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome

Confession 1: I am a football fan. My father took me to Cal games at Memorial Stadium — one of the most beautiful places to watch more or less anything, tucked there against the slope by Strawberry Canyon, gold-and-green hills behind, the Bay, the Bridge and Mt. Tam to the west. We’d go to one or two games a season, rarely victories (my Golden Bears were valiant, but not that good), and as I lost dad when I was ten, those are memories overlaid with power.

I was aware of the ‘Niners then too, but as an East Bay kid with a full sporran* of high school anomie and safe rebellion, the Raiders were the real deal, all felons and left handed QBs and chain-smoking stick-um slathered Fred Biletnekoff. And yeah, Tatum’s embrace of that hit made me sick, but football, you know?

Then I moved to Boston, four years for college and then, after a few seasons away, for good. I still claimed to be a Raiders fan, (Plunkett!), and as a Bay Area kid, I took more pleasure than previous allegiance entitled me to in the Montana across the bay. But I paid attention to the Patriots. I always thought Grogan was cool, and Hannah was such an archetypal football guy and so on. They usually sucked, but they weren’t (mostly) dull. I’ll pass over the Berry years in silence.

Then, of course, we got that other guy named Bill, soon to be followed by the 199th pick in that draft, a hopelessly unathletic kid, Tommy something. You know the rest: it was easy to root for a hopelessly underdoggy team of Patriots in that 9/11 fall, a season capped by a most improbable playoff run. Been high living ever since.

So I’ve been watching a long time and for many of those years Sunday was a pretty well defined ritual, at least one game, sometimes two, and hanging out with folks I enjoyed. I watch a lot less now. Because the Patriots have stayed good and I’m something of a front-runner, I check in for most of their fourth quarters, but it’s rare indeed that I watch a whole game through any more.

Partly I’ve lost patience with the action to hanging around ratio. Partly I’m more jealous of my time than I was when I thought it came in infinite supply. But yeah: partly, increasingly, I’m seeing myself as an accessory to genuinely awful stuff.

Confession 2: I know that football destroys minds and lives. It’s impossible not to know that now, and if you needed any reminder, there’s a story in today’s New York Times** by the wife of a former NFL player to put a face to life after too much grievous bodily harm.

When we married in 2009, I already knew he was an amazing father. He could play dollhouse with my stepdaughter for hours without a hint of boredom. This continued when we had two children of our own. When our son was born and I was focused on taking care of a baby, he would bathe the girls, brush and blow-dry their (tangled!) hair, then put them to bed. Afterward he would wash the dishes. He brought me coffee in bed each morning. I was spoiled rotten.

But since I had known him, he had trouble sleeping, and he has been prone to mood swings and depression. In 2010, things got worrisome, so I arranged for him to be evaluated by neurologists so that he could apply for disability benefits. …

I was right to be concerned.

Over time, I had started to notice changes. But this was different and, around 2013, things had become much more frightening.

He lost weight. It seemed like one day, out of the blue, he stopped being hungry. And often he would forget to eat. I’d find full bowls of cereal left around the house, on bookshelves or the fireplace mantel. The more friends and family commented on his gaunt frame, the more panicked I became. By 2016, he had shrunk to 157 pounds. That’s right, my 6-foot-2 football-player husband weighed 157 pounds (down from around 200 when he was in the N.F.L.). People were visibly shocked when we told them he had played the game professionally.

This is a gut and heart rending tale, made worse by the increasing pile of evidence that Rob Kelly’s is not an isolated case.

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It seems to me that such an outcome is intrinsic to the game, not obviously correctable by changing rules or equipment. Yesterday I procrastinated in the face of some early eighteenth century financial asset analysis that was just a little tricky to tease apart, and pulled up some old Super Bowl videos on Youtube. I landed on a couple of Montana highlights and I was genuinely surprised to see how brutal the game seemed. Those games were before the rule changes came in intended to protect the quarterbacks, and Joe Cool was getting whacked on almost every play, as rushers would take one, two, even three steps after he’d released the ball and slam into him at full speed. There’s a reason top quarterbacks are playing longer than they did then, and one of the big ones is that they don’t get turned into hamburger helper by the third quarter of every game. I’m amazed, frankly, that anyone from that age of football can remember their names, and I confess (another one!) I’d forgotten just how thoroughly physical the game was back then.

I’d still say the risks are higher now though, at least plausibly. Another change from then and now is that players at every position are bigger, stronger, more powerful and faster than they were back then. Some hits may have been legislated out of the game, but those that occur are hugely violent, and in the routine, subconcussive zone, all that slugging that goes on in line play gets done by men who are simply huger than their predecessors, and in ridiculous shape. When I was a kid, a 300 pound lineman on either side of the ball was a giant, almost a freak. Now? Well everyone knew that Vince Wilfork, to speak of one Patriots great, was a very big man. But even at 325 pounds he wasn’t seen as off the charts.

All of which to say is that every time I watch a football game I not only know that I’m seeing fit, impeccably trained, incredibly gifted young men hurt themselves for my entertainment, I find myself watching each tackle and wondering, surprisingly often, if that’s the one that turns that gorgeously talented twenty something guy into the forty year old-to-be who can’t remember where his bowl of cereal went.

That is: I can’t suspend my awareness of how the game works anymore. I used to could, but can’t anymore.

Confession 3: I’ll watch the game this evening. I’ve even got a few friends coming over, and we’ll have the Mexican bean dip and some Peruvian chicken thighs (fabulous: I’ll post the recipe soon) and some Dogfish Head IPA and all that. We will root for the Patriots, because d’uh — and y’all hate us ’cause you ain’t us. The rooting thing is real: it’s fun to pick a set of laundry you decide is your flag and cheer for that. The game, played at the highest level, still is amazing to watch — in fact, that’s the dirty secret. Football can be thrilling, a catharsis, and it’s easy to get hooked on the seemingly harmless rush of life-and-death, victory and defeat to be found on the mock-battlefield of a football field. And the social side is real too, hanging with folks on a day when all diets are off and so on. We’ll watch, and we’ll probably have a good time.

But I’m finding it harder and harder to do so. This is how I feel: the right thing to do is obvious, but the long, long habit of not doing it remains hard to break. Eventually, the time comes when that tension turns into a contradiction, and that’s it.

With five decades of reflex to undo, I don’t know if tonight will be the last time I turn on the NFL.

But I hope it is.

*I actually wore a great kilt (with all the trimmings) to my high school in my senior year. Even played badminton in it (not recommended). This guy I’d seen around, kind of intimidating, came up to me at recess or lunch, and asked me what it was. I told him. He just looked at me for a moment, then cracked up and said “you’re brave.” I confess (again): I exhaled.

**Posted 2/2, in print today.

Image: Edmund Blair Leighton, The Gladiator’s Wife, 1884.

I Hear There’s A Sporting Contest TodayPost + Comments (217)

The Selfishness of It All

by John Cole| October 9, 20177:45 pm| 193 Comments

This post is in: Gun nuts, Stream of Consciousness

I’m warning you in advance this is going to be another rambling post.

Yesterday I was looking at the pictures of the victims of the Las Vegas shooting, and I made it a point to read every bio that was provided. I figured it was the least I could do, because I know we aren’t going to do a fucking thing as a country to honor their memory with any meaningful action on the gun front. I was just struck, with few exceptions, how young they all were:

Quinton Robbins was 20. When I was 20, I was living in Germany, serving in the Army, and just having the time of my life. Seeing new things, doing something important for the first time in my life, on my own, paying my own bills, and making friends that I still to this day keep in touch with pretty regularly.

Sonny Melton was 29. When I was 29 I was at the tail end of grad school, and I still went to a lot of concerts and went out all the time and was still pretty wild. That could have been me.

Rachael Parker was 33. When I was 33 I didn’t have my life in any sort of order, but I was finally making decent money and could afford to do things, and I had Tunch and lot of close friends.

And on and on and on. And now, they are just all gone. They are no more.

I know we have all sorts of differing opinions on the afterlife, but mine is pretty simple. When you’re dead you’re dead. That’s the ballgame, as they say. Roll the credits. It’s just over.

I know that’s really hard for people to comprehend, so that’s why I think we have so many myths made up to comfort people about the afterlife, because it’s really hard to contemplate not existing or the world continuing to exist without you- all of us are to some degree egocentric in that way. We’re the only thing that has been with us our entire lives- you always have to live with yourself, because you never go away until you go away.

And the euphemisms we employ to soothe us- passed away, moved on, is in a better place, the long sleep. I find it hard to put a finger on mortality, too. The best way I’ve come to imagine what the world would like be without me is to try to think back to my earliest memory as a child, and then to go farther into nothingness. Just a void- you can’t remember any more before that. Well, that’s what it will be like when we are gone, I think.

And when you are dead, that’s the end of experience. On the drive home today I picked up a small Coke slush and had a sip and just smiled because it was so good. I listened to Kendrick Lamar DAMN. for the fifth or sixth time, and this time, for the first time, I kind of got it (you have to listen to it in reverse order). His others all made “sense” musically the first listening, especially Good Kid, which is another one of those perfect albums. And it happened while I was cruising along on the highway, with my polarized sunglasses on so everything looked so precise because my eyes didn’t have to filter out the glare, the fall foliage was amazing, the sun was filtering through the thick rain clouds that are a consequence of Hurricane Nate, the windows were down and the pollen was low and I just had that rushing “Oh, I think I get it and appreciate it now” feeling and the hair on my arms stood up a little bit. Later on I was driving down the back roads, and the smell of leaves and manure and the sweet country air filled the car, and I saw a beautiful Holstein just sitting down by the fence, chomping away, twitching her tail and I pulled over and watcher her for a bit.

None of those fifty dead will ever get to experience anything like that ever again. Not the feel of clean sheets, the cold floor when you wake up, the burst of hot water in the shower, the minty taste of toothpaste on a new tooth brush, the aroma of the morning coffee, or the feel of your kid’s hands as you walk them to the school bus or kiss your lover again. They will never get any of that ever again. Those things are just gone for them.

And this is where some will inevitably say but their memories will linger on. No they won’t. More than likely, history will not remember them as people- they might be known for a while as victims, but who they are as people will die off in a couple generations, as their loved ones move on. There have been billions of people- history remembers very few. Maybe if they had lived full lives, one of them might have done something extraordinary in the historical sense, but I doubt it. And I’m not saying that to be an asshole- people do extraordinary little things every day, from things as simple as slamming on the brakes to not hit a squirrel or saying something kind to someone who is having a bad day. Time washes all the stuff but the greatest achievements away- the Grand Canyon wasn’t always so grand.

It’s a fragile and short and wonderful thing being alive, and your life is really, truly, the only thing you have in this world. And that’s what is so damned maddening about these shootings. All of those people had the only thing that mattered stolen from them, literally robbed at gunpoint, just so a few people retain their unfettered right to own a little hand-held killing machine that makes their dick hard or gives them a grin for ten seconds at a firing range.

It’s sick. It’s a sickness. Like I said earlier, you have to live with yourselves your whole life, and I just don’t know how these people who oppose all gun control do it. There is just something wrong with them. They are broken. And worse still are the politicians who oppose it for a few coins and some political power.

Some of them, I suspect, know it, which is why they rely on nonsense arguments like “more people are killed by cars” or all the other bullshit that gets churned up. They’ll tell you if we ban guns only criminals will have guns. OK. Then we lock them up until we get all the guns. We can change- there used to be a time when there weren’t seatbelts in cars. Or “We can’t confiscate all guns.” Sure we can. It will just take time.

But even assuming they are right, why the fuck does it hurt to try?

Again, it’s a sickness. And everyone who continues to fight for the right to unfettered access to guns is complicit. They didn’t pull the trigger, but they might as well have.

It’s just a level of selfishness that I will never ever ever understand.

The Selfishness of It AllPost + Comments (193)

Another Rambling Thread About Music and Other Things

by John Cole| July 12, 20178:00 pm| 91 Comments

This post is in: Stream of Consciousness

First things first- on my way home from the grocery store today, a fracking truck kicked up a rock (more than likely part of the road they have torn up because the trucks are constantly driving over the lip and ripping the concrete and asphalt up) and cracked my windshield. There went a quick $300 bucks. It’s all part of the miracle of the free market. On top of a Subaru that got totaled when they drove my friend off the road and into the field AND DIDN’T STOP, I get destroyed road, traffic hazards such as trucks driving roads to narrow at speeds too high, debris all over the roads when their offroad vehicles come onto the roads during their pipeline constructions, numerous delays by flagmen, and excruciatingly slow drives as oversized loads transfer equipment, I now have to buy a new windshield. And this isn’t even going into the longterm damage to the water table which we all FUCKING KNOW is inevitable and will be met with a massive hoocoodanode, although we might not find out about it since the state GOP and the Trump are dismantling all the regulators. Or the eyesore of large fracking pads all over the god damned place.

And what does WV get in return? A couple permanent jobs, lots of people from Texas and Oklahoma driving around in monster trucks to and from work, and not much else. We aren’t taxing them much of anything, the profits are all exported with the resources, any time you mention taxing them more some idiot states the same bullshit we heard for years when we talked about coal taxes: “We can’t tax them too much, they’ll just go somewhere else.”

NO, THEY FUCKING WON’T. DO YOU KNOW HOW I KNOW THIS? BECAUSE THIS IS WHERE THE FUCKING NATURAL GAS IS.

So I guess I will just bend over and pay safelite a couple hundred bucks when they come tomorrow, lie back, and think of tax-cut jeebus. Sick of this shit and the way the right has fucked this country.

***

Moving along before I stroke out for real.

I spent some time today importing more music into the digital archive, and I imported a bunch of old Paste magazine cd samplers from the early 2000’s through 2009. As we have discussed at length, I have many, many issues and require correct metadata and artwork for everything I import, and I first thought that this was going to be a disaster. It turned out it wasn’t.

As many of you know, if for no other reason that I rant about it all the time, itunes uses the gracenote public automatic content recognition to fill out artwork and metadata for imported music, so that means it is not a complete archive of all music. It’s what people have and have imported, warts and all. I was sure there would be no artwork in the database for these cd samplers, and I was right! They were, however, correctly recognized, so I just had to find the artwork. This turned out to be easier than i though, as Paste magazine has all of them archived on their website in .pdf format. I just had to download them, convert them to .jpg, and crop them. Easy enough.

It turned out to be a pretty fascinating and weird modern archaelogical project. It was interesting seeing who was “unknown” at the time, who would make it, who would not, etc., but even more interesting was the artwork. Viewing thee sampler artwork through the years turned out to be like watching the extinction event for a magazine.

The artwork for the earlier years was just beautiful. High quality photographs, beautiful layouts- people put a lot of time, thought, pride, and energy into them. Again, I know I am an oddball because I really do appreciate album and video game artwork, but see for yourself. Here is the very first piece from Q3 of 2002:

Here is one from 2005:

Another from 2005:

Here is February of 2007:

I’m not a photographer (as you all frequently remind me), but these are good covers for a sampler cd. And they were all like that from 2002-2007. And then came the real estate unpleasantness of 2007. Here’s some background from wikipedia:

In October 2007, the magazine tried the “Radiohead” experiment, offering new and current subscribers the ability to pay what they wanted for a one-year subscription to Paste. The subscriber base increased by 28,000, but Paste president Tim Regan-Porter noted the model was not sustainable; he hoped the new subscribers would renew the following year at the current rates, and the increase in web traffic would attract additional subscribers and advertisers.

Amidst an economic downturn, Paste began to suffer from lagging ad revenue, as did other magazine publishers in 2008 and 2009. On May 14, 2009, Paste editors announced a plan to save the magazine, by pleading to its readers, musicians and celebrities for contributions. Cost-cutting by the magazine did not stem the losses. The main crux cited for the financial troubles is the lack of advertiser spending.

I don’t know if the two are directly related- Paste was having problems anyway. But anecdotally I suppose you can actually visualize the impact of the crash and the decline of Paste Magazine through the artwork. Here is February 2008 (note, this is prior to the actual market crash):

Notice the corporate logo’s? Here is August 2008:

And here is January 2009:

It never recovered from there, and the print version of Paste magazine ceased to be in 2010. It’s depressing to think about, like watching an extinction event in slow motion.

It’s also interesting to think about how things are being archived in the digital era. With Moore’s Law and the Law of Mass Digital Storage, we are used to ever faster processing and ever increasing storage space, but where is it all going and who is keeping track of it? What is happening to it? We all seem to think that with all this new storage space, once something is out on the internet it will be there forever. That may very well be true regarding celebrity nudes and your dumbest tweet, but for a lot of other things it just isn’t the case. Read this from 2013:

A new study has found that as much as 80 percent of the raw scientific data collected by researchers in the early 1990s is gone forever, mostly because no one knows where to find it.

According to a study by Timothy H. Vines, et al. titled “The Availability of Research Data Declines Rapidly with Article Age,” published last week in Current Biology, most raw data from scientific papers published twenty years ago is unobtainable – either because authors have since changed their contact information and can’t be reached or because the data was stored using outdated technology, like floppy disks.

I sure as hell don’t know where my data from the late 90’s is. I know I have a box with old mainframe SAS printouts in the basement from grad school, but I wouldn’t have the first idea what to do with it now. And as a gamer, this is crazy:

The people who make enhanced editions of old role-playing games like Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment want to do the same thing for Icewind Dale II. There’s just one problem: nobody knows where to find the code.

Beamdog, a Canadian publisher best known for releasing snazzy new versions of old Infinity Engine RPGs like the ones mentioned above, is looking to re-release Icewind Dale II with enhanced graphics and other improvements. But Beamdog’s CEO, Trent Oster, says his team can’t find the source code for Icewind Dale II. Without that code, he says, they can’t make any sort of enhanced edition of the game.

“We’ve searched all the archives we have access to, including all the data handed over to Wizards of the Coast from Atari and there is no source code for Icewind Dale II,” Oster told me in an e-mail. “We’ve reached out to our friends at Obsidian, as many of them were the development staff behind Icewind Dale II, and they do not have any source code. We’re stalled on the project without source and the project won’t move forward until we can find it. We’ve naturally moved on to other things until there is a change in the situation.”

Wow. This kind of stuff should be important. We should be archiving things. Our collective digital knowledge isn’t going to always “just be there.” It’s going to need people who care to take care of it, and a willingness to finance those endeavors like we would with museums or libraries. Well, like we used to, I guess.

Although, I guess, maybe it is irrelevant, because we are living through another slow motion mass extinction event:

A massive iceberg the size of Delaware has broken free from Antarctica and is floating in the sea.

“Put any adjective you like on it: a corker, a whopper — it’s a really large iceberg,” says Anna Hogg, a researcher with the United Kingdom’s Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds.

“There have been some this big before,” says Adrian Luckman, a glaciologist at Swansea University in the U.K. who leads a project to track changes in the ice shelf. But he adds, the roughly trillion-metric-ton iceberg is unusual. “This is certainly in the Top 10, maybe possibly in the Top 5.”

And then there is this:

From the common barn swallow to the exotic giraffe, thousands of animal species are in precipitous decline, a sign that an irreversible era of mass extinction is underway, new research finds.

The study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, calls the current decline in animal populations a “global epidemic” and part of the “ongoing sixth mass extinction” caused in large measure by human destruction of animal habitats. The previous five extinctions were caused by natural phenomena.

Gerardo Ceballos, a researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City, acknowledged that the study is written in unusually alarming tones for an academic research paper. “It wouldn’t be ethical right now not to speak in this strong language to call attention to the severity of the problem,” he said.

I grew up in rural areas. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get rid of barn swallows. This should scare the hell out of you. I guess maybe worrying about digital archives is a waste of concern right now. Nothing really matters any more, does it.

I warned you this would be rambling.

Another Rambling Thread About Music and Other ThingsPost + Comments (91)

The Republican Party is tearing itself apart. It’s about damn time.

by Soonergrunt| October 10, 20168:00 pm| 218 Comments

This post is in: America, I'm With Her, Politics, Stream of Consciousness, Assholes, Blogospheric Navel-Gazing, Both Sides Do It!, Schadenfreude

The following is from a Tweetstorm I composed yesterday in the hours before that shitshow of a “debate.” There are probably some spelling and grammar errors, because for the most part, I just copied and pasted from my Twitter account, @soonergrunt.

Someone asked me recently why I’m a dick to Conservatives who engage me on Twitter. I’m not to everyone. @RadioFreeTom is a notable example. There are others. But I’ll tell you the answer now. I came to political conscience in the age of Ronald Reagan. I liked him as a person, but I didn’t agree with him on much. But I respected him. He was my President, for one thing, but also my parents taught me that the other side were decent people who wanted what they saw as best for the country. They just happened to usually be wrong. And sometimes they were right. That kind of consideration is something I’ve rarely received in return. Rare enough that I remember a lot of those respectful interactions. They stick out due to their rarity.

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What I’ve heard most of my adult life is that as a Democrat and a Liberal in particular, that I didn’t love my country. Liberals in the Army get used to this kind of thing very, very quickly. We learn to keep our mouths shut. The same NCOs and officers who are telling you that ppl like you should be killed for treason are the same people writing your NCOER. They are the same people who are supposed to risk their lives for you. Even after serving as a combat infantryman, some of the guys I served with, and a LOT of civilians still would say things like that. This kind of thing was pushed a little bit by Reagan, but a LOT by Newt Gingrich. And it’s burned into the modern Republican Party’s DNA. FOX News monetized this. Tune in, anytime day or night, and you’ll see what I’m talking about within a few minutes. Millions watch daily. The typical Conservative is so incredibly vicious because s/he has been raised on a steady diet of vitriol and hate for 2 decades now.

It’s to the point where Conservatives who aren’t calling for a Liberal to be killed, who aren’t calling for a Liberal’s daughter to be raped who aren’t calling for a Liberal to lose his employment are the atypical ones. You spend 30 years hearing this kind of thing, and maybe you aren’t quite so open minded and accepting anymore. It’s hard to take people at face value, because you’re just waiting for the other shoe.

There’s probably more than just the 4 or 5 Cons that I follow that are worth following. There’s a lot of people on Twitter after all. But they’re very hard to find in this bitterest of election years.

@SopanDeb had a couple of tweets yesterday about talking to Establishment Republicans who were, in his words, shocked at all of the hatred directed at Hillary Clinton from the right. That they considered her just another cynical politician. I RT’ed that with a hearty ‘fuck you’ or some such attached to it. Today’s ‘establishment Rs’ came up on that attitude and behavior. They are the principle actors and benefactors. Well, right now we’re watching the Republican Party self-destruct. Where it is because the party and intellectual leaders on the right have, for decades, sold them on the idea that they are the only true patriots and that anyone who opposes them is aligned with the enemies. And now, as was inevitable, they’ve turned on the Conservatives who aren’t complete assholes. Well, I’m not really sorry for them. They are reaping what they have sewn.

When I was a kid, there were Conservative Democrats & Liberal Republicans, and most people held views that occasionally crossed ideological lines. I tend to believe in a much stronger military and more robust foreign policy than many of my liberal brethren. It is essential to the health of the Liberal movement and the Democratic Party, and most especially to the political health of the Nation for there to be a functioning, engaged Conservative movement and a center right party. I don’t know if the Republican Party will survive or if something else will rise in its place, but it’s going to take a while. It took decades to get here, and it won’t be changed one way or the other overnight. I take some small consolation that many Conservatives are now experiencing what people like me have for decades. But schadenfreude isn’t something I should be proud of.

It’s going to be interesting to watch, but I really am worried for the near-term future of the country. I do believe that in the end, things will be OK. I believe that most people are essentially good and decent in their hearts and that my kids will see a better country and a better world. If you’ve made it this far, you sure are a glutton for punishment, but I thank you for reading.

The Republican Party is tearing itself apart. It’s about damn time.Post + Comments (218)

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Consistently wrong since 2002

All your base are belong to Tunch.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

Naturally gregarious and alpha

Peak wingnut was a lie.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Call the National Guard if your insurrection lasts more than four hours.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

I swear, each month of 2020 will have its own history degree.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

There will be lawyers.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn – Nancy Pelosi

People are complicated. Love is not.

How do you get liars to care about the truth?

Just a few bad apples.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

‘Forty-two’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

Good luck with your asparagus.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if I ever tried to have some of you killed.

Usually wrong but never in doubt