Some nasty weather up here- frozen mix followed by snow and the roads are a hot mess even though there has only been about an inch and a half of accumulation because the rain froze underneath it. So there you go, all you guys with massive SUV’s and pick up trucks with dual exhausts and “MAKE IT NASTY” or “BAD COMPANY” across the top of your windshield- sometimes an inch and a half is enough and you don’t need to compensate.

I went to town and stocked up for supplies, and I’ve got a pork shoulder in the crock pot with kraut to make it through the blustery weekend, so I got that going for me. I also picked up enough dog and cat treats so I can make it a few days without being cut. Speaking of, here’s a pic of Steve:

I can’t state too often how awesome he is. He’s always around me, and he just does crazy shit all day long. About a half hour ago, I was sitting here watching Homeland, and he came racing from the bedroom, streaked through the hallway and living room, and jumped from about three feet away and managed to hit the hole on his cat tree on the second level. It was awesome.

Speaking of Homeland, I’m working my way through Season 1, and this description on Comcast of an episode cracked me up in a sad kind of way:

In the previous episode, the FBI had accidentally shot and killed two men at morning prayers in a mosque while chasing an alleged terrorist, and the way Comcast (and the show of most of America looks at it), the chief concern is the PR nightmare. Not the dead people or accountability. Art imitates life.

Same as it ever was; I was just willfully blind for a while.

/endramble

BTW- is Morena Baccarin the most beautiful human being on the planet or what? Thank you, Whedon.

Friday Night Open ThreadPost + Comments (53)

Good piece on Mandela and conservatives, then and now:

William F. Buckley was the founder of National Review, and America’s leading conservative intellectual for much of the second half of the 20th century. He was also an explicit supporter of white supremacy — throughout the 1950s and 1960s he scoffed at the idea that either black Africans or black Americans were capable of self-governance.
As the years passed Buckley’s public views on the civil rights movement in the United States became more moderated, but his antipathy to popular democracy in Africa remained a constant. Here he is in a 1986 op-ed, writing just four years before Mandela was released from prison — at a time when the South African government had already begun the secret negotiations that would lead to an orderly transition to majority rule in that country:
“Western democratic fundamentalism has made things especially hard in South Africa for one simple reason, and that is that Western opinion has consolidated around the position that unless every black in South Africa over the age of 18 is given the vote, there is still injustice in the land.
“The government will not … grant political equality to everyone in South Africa. Nor should it. It is preposterous at one and the same time to remark the widespread illiteracy in South Africa and to demand the universal franchise.
“Continue our moral pressure, by all means. But … pull back on the one-man, one vote business.”
The open racism on display here is startling, of course. But so is the blatant antipathy to democracy itself. An insistence on the rightness of popular self-determination is, in Buckley’s eyes, a form of “fundamentalism” — if the black majority in South Africa, after generations of white minority suppression, is not prepared to exercise the franchise in the way, and with the results, that Buckley prefers, then it is entirely right and popular for that white minority to deny them the vote indefinitely.
Not thirty years ago one of America’s most prominent conservatives offered the opinion, unsolicited, that black South Africans would not, could not, and should not govern themselves.
That shouldn’t be forgotten.

Pull back on the one man, one vote businessPost + Comments (87)

Don’t know where everyone else is, but kindly accept this image of kangaroos invading a golf course during the Australian Open as a token of my esteem, and feel free to discuss whatever.

Open ThreadPost + Comments (93)