Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Infrastructure week. at last.

I can’t take this shit today. I just can’t.

Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

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

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Consistently wrong since 2002

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

We still have time to mess this up!

No one could have predicted…

Militantly superior in their own minds…

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Nature

Monday Morning Open Thread: Year-End Zombie Week Edition

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It could be worse! From a friend who works there lol –

Imagine that this is the first thing you see when you come to work in the morning –


(I think it’s a stone marten, which seems to cause the same problems in Northern Europe that skunks or racoons cause here in the States.)

On the other hand, possibly a good omen (at least for capitalism) for 2022…

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Peak Autumn

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I love this exact time of year. The leaves are half-turned. The elections are over. My most favorite holiday is bearing down on us. Beanies are acceptable fashion. At the same time, it’s almost, but not quite, too cold to wear sandals. The Vitamin D deficiency* hasn’t kicked in yet. It’s a time for wistfulness and preparation against the coming dark. In another era, in Basque country, somebody way up my family tree would be preserving food for the winter. I myself am thinking of getting the new Animal Crossing expansion, which is sort of the same thing. And today we went to Central Park to look at the leaves.

Peak Autumn

It was a spectacular day, as you can see. Probably fifty-five degrees in the sun. I knew I had to go today because it’s going to start getting dark so early once we force it to in a few hours–and I am not a morning person.

When I got back, I had to do some work for the podcast version of an upcoming short story that I’m very excited to share with you all. The story has a number of words and phrases in Tlingit, a Native Alaskan/Canadian language, which unfortunately has few pronunciation resources and fewer than two hundred native speakers. So we puzzled over the international phonetic alphabet for an hour or two. It was kind of fun. (If you’d like to buy the print version, it’s available, but I’ll be doing a post on it in a couple of weeks too when it’s up for free.)

What sorts of things do you all usually get up to this time of year? When the leaves get that color, I know it’s time to think about making chili…

Open thread! And bonus Samwise:

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Late Night Open Thread: NYC Predators

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Trigger warning: TFG…

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Oh Mah Gawd! Is That Floriduh! Man’s Music?!?!

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Floriduh says hold mah beer!

As a native Floriduhian, I guarantee someone in Miami actually owns one of these. I can also guarantee that either he or someone he knows will use it to try to self medicate against Covid.

And a whole bunch of people who live in the parts of the state we call BettyCracker land are right now trying to figure out how to illegally import them so they can self medicate with them against Covid.

This will all be followed by them being dumped, en masse, into the scrub in different parts of Floriduh creating a new non-native and invasive menace to go along with the monkeys that have herpes, the anacondas, the retirees from the rust belt living in the Villages who also all have STDs, and people from Long Island living in Broward and Palm Beach Counties!

Obligatory!

Looney Tunes Florida GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

Open thread!

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OK Boomer (Open Thread)

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During mating season, male alligators flirt with females and let rival gator dudes know there’s someone in the territory by “booming,” i.e., making a deep, guttural call while partially submerged in such a way that their scaly backs vibrate and produce a dancing water courtship display. (I don’t judge — I’ve seen far more inexplicable courtship displays by humans.)

Anyhoo, the booming typically ramps up when rainy season starts in June, but if you’re in the right place, you can hear gators booming all summer long. Here’s a 30-second vid I took with my phone from my porch a while ago. You won’t see the gators, but if you turn up the sound, you’ll hear distant gators calling and then a response that sounds like it’s coming from under my dock.

The alarmingly close gator you can hear at about the 20-second mark is probably Dexter, a little gator who has been hanging out on our dock when the river is high this summer, but it sure sounds big and scary, which is probably the point.

I have a healthy respect for gators, which is why I keep my dogs away from the water at all times and do not swim except in springs where I can see clearly. That said, I don’t live in fear of them. You’re hundreds or maybe even thousands of times more likely to die in a car collision with a deer than be attacked by a gator.

And yet, there’s something primordial about that booming that can freeze the blood, even if you’re in your own house that is safely elevated above the surface of the water. I think of it as nature’s way of saying, “You ain’t all that, human.” It’s an important and helpful reminder.

Open thread!

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Saturday Evening Open Thread: Pop Culture & Otherwise

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The movie I’m looking forward to is The Green Knight, but not until I can watch it at home. Any of you braver Jackals seen it yet?

Sportsball-adjacent:

Former U.S. President Barack Obama has joined NBA Africa as a strategic partner to help advance social responsibility efforts across the continent, the National Basketball Association said on Tuesday.

Obama will have a minority equity stake in the new venture, which over time he intends to use to fund Obama Foundation youth and leadership programs across Africa.

“By investing in communities, promoting gender equality, and cultivating the love of the game of basketball, I believe that NBA Africa can make a difference for so many of Africa’s young people,” Obama said in a news release…

And from the faunasphere…

… [Bird ecologist Richard] Major has been studying Australian birds for almost 40 years. A few years back, he began noticing something peculiar in Sydney: cockatoos that were eating out of someone’s open trash bin.

“I wasn’t really expecting cockatoos to be rubbish bin feeders,” he said. “They’re not something like ibis or crows that are scavengers. These are good, self-respecting seed-eaters — or at least plant-eaters.”…

“The thing that really got me was when I saw a cockatoo fly up from a rubbish bin, sit on a electricity wire, holding a chicken drumstick in its foot,” he says, explaining that a cockatoo can perch on one leg and hold its food in another. “Here it was, just munching on a drumstick, and I thought, ‘Oh god, this is verging on cannibalism.’ Certainly once cockatoos start eating meat, we’re done for.”

He’d just assumed that those bins were already open and overflowing — nothing clever about that. But Major later began observing several of the birds actually opening the bins themselves, and now he was intrigued. If this behavior spreads, he thought, “There’ll be cockatoos opening bins all over the place and they’ll have this endless supply of rubbish.” A cockatoo smorgasbord…

A team of scientists — including John Martin, Sonja Wild, Jana K. Hörsch and Lucy Aplin — joined Klump and Major to figure out what was going on with these clever cockatoos. They started by sending surveys out to different suburbs in Sydney to ask people if they had noticed the big white parrots opening up their trash bins and, if they had, when they first saw it. The survey results showed that over two years, the number of trash-raiding cockatoo sightings had increased from just three suburbs to 44, indicating that the birds were learning from each other. A culture of trash can break-ins was radiating out from the birds who first figured it out…

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Nature & Respite Open Thread: Some Good News

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Nature & Respite Open Thread: Some Good News

(Jeff Danziger via GoComics.com)


The Invisible Hand of the Market gives Keystone XL two thumbs down, with no little assistance from the Biden administration. Mr Pierce, at Esquire, takes a well-earned victory lap — “The Keystone Pipeline Defeat Is a Rare Example of Democratic Political Dexterity in the Heartland”:

… For a decade, the fight over the pipeline went on. The project was on, then it was off again. Egregious lies were told, especially about the economic benefits of the death funnel. Dire predictions were made about the consequences of a leak in the pipeline so close to the Ogallala Aquifer, the massive freshwater source for almost all the arable farmland of the Great Plains. (TransCanada’s other pipelines have leaked because they were pipelines, and pipelines leak.) There were hearings and votes and the national government changed twice. And late Wednesday afternoon, Randy Thompson and all the other people who took on this hopeless fight…won.

“On the day he was inaugurated, Mr. Biden, who has vowed to make tackling climate change a centerpiece of his administration, rescinded the construction permit for the pipeline, which developers had sought to build for over a decade. That same day, TC Energy, the company behind the project, said it was suspending work on the line. On Wednesday, the company wrote in a statement that it “will continue to coordinate with regulators, stakeholders and Indigenous groups to meet its environmental and regulatory commitments and ensure a safe termination of and exit from the project.”

One hesitates to declare this project dead because it has rolled back the stone a number of times over the past 10 years, but this seems final. TC Energy, TransCanada’s latest nom de pillage, seems to have surrendered…

At a time in which nothing seems to be moving in the correct direction, especially as regards the climate crisis, this is an underdog’s victory over which to rejoice. I am happy for Randy Thompson, who can look out over his fields again and not worry about somebody with a clipboard.

Not as prominent on the front pages, but also significant:

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