So…a state that denies climate change wants twenty billion of federal tax money (60 billion+ before its finished) to protect the tax exempt industry most responsible for climate change from the destruction is brings that they deny is real….all on taxpayer money, not a bit industry funded.

I grew up in Houston/Galveston. This is stupidity. There’s no way in hell they’ll ever stop hurricane flooding. The barriers would need to be 30 ft tall, not 5. They would also need to redirect numerous rivers that outflow through the coast, and find a way to remove unfathomable amounts of flood waters coming from land. I was there for Alicia, a relatively small hurricane in the 80’s, and all of Houston was 5 ft under water, with the bayous 40ft above their channels. That water flows into the Galveston area….behind these barriers.

This is a massive boondoggle that will never be built for dozens of reasons, but will still make numerous politicians and their families disgustingly rich, and may eventually partially protect some high value real estate, but never the entire coast. That’s today’s Texas. It bears noting, Texas is nearly $50 billion in debt with a crumbling electric grid, failing water system, no social services, and likely still $10 billion away from finishing their useless failed border fence….but plan to spend at least another $10 billion of state funds on this. How, exactly?

Twenty minutes in and Ari is crushing it.

I would say really.

As a man, president and his administration...
- ordered an attack on the Brookings Institution
- 13 of the 'president's men' jailed (2 were A.G.s)
- Agnew resigned after allegations of bribery* (as governor) led to a conviction on tax fraud.
- "Townhouse Operation" crime wave itself
- Associated Milk Producers Inc, IT&T...even the Checkers thing foreshadowed all the sketchy 'campaign donations'

...and the Vietnam peace talks affair was in the same league as Eric's dad's 1st impeachment charge ('tho not as president)...if pushed to support 'how bad was bad' remember Nixon put marijuana on the schedule one drug list, essentially to criminalize blacks, was a much much larger crime to humanity. emptied the penny jar and a twenty from the till, if you will.

But I get your point.

[Hardin administration was pretty awful too]


* something his former lawyer said he admitted went on "for a thousand years"

Saturday Satan, Sunday saint
Foolin' your neighbors
That's what you think
Readin' the good book
Singin' the hymns
Come Monday morning and it's back to a life of sin

Old brother Brown
All week he steals
Tells everyone
His big business deals
The deacon walks by
A dollar hits the plate
Tryin' to buy himself a ticket to the pearly gates

Old sister Rose
On the very first row
Been a-sittin' right there
Twenty years or so
Never hears a word
When the preacher speaks
Too busy talkin' bout the bad girl down the street

Saturday Satan, Sunday saint
Foolin' your neighbors
Readin' the good book
Singin' the hymns
Come Monday mornin' and it's back to a life of sin
This little song holds good advice
Though some people may
Think it ain't too nice
Well, if you're one
Who's wearing the shoes
Well, there's somebody watchin' and he ain't nobody's fool

Saturday Satan, Sunday saint
Foolin' your neighbors
Readin' the good book
Singin' the hymns
Come Monday mornin' and it's back to a life of sin
Come Monday mornin' and it's back to a life of sin

I ain't slept in seven days, haven't ate in three
Methamphetamine has got a damn good hold of me
My tweaker friends have got me to the point of no return
I just took the lighter to the bulb and watched it burn

This life of sin has got me in
Well it's got me back in prison once again
I used my only phone call to contact my daddy
I got twenty long years for some dust in a baggie

Well if I would have listened to my dear old mom and dad
I wouldn't be locked up in prison, troubled in the head
I took that little pop and sucked until my mind was spun
I got twenty years to sit and think of what I've done

This life of sin has got me in
Well it's got me back in prison once again
I used my only phone call to contact my daddy
I got twenty long years for some dust in a baggie

Sometimes I sit and wonder where my little life went wrong
These old jailhouse blues have got me singing this old song
My life is a disaster, Lord and I feel so ashamed
In here where they call by a number, not a name

This life of sin has got me in
Well it's got me back in prison once again
I used my only phone call to contact my daddy
I got twenty long years for some dust in a baggie
I used my only phone call to contact my daddy
I got twenty long years for some dust in a baggie

What the fuck are you talking about? Did you have a stroke or something? Carbon monoxide leak?


Those are not out of context, they are chronological and taken together.


What? Yeah yeah yeah I've seen the argument he said "peaceful protest" yeah he said it ONE time at around the 18 minute mark. People can go look at the rest of the speech transcript with a simple google search. The ONE time he said the word 'peace' pales in comparison to the rest of the HOUR and twenty minutes of hate rhetoric.

In any case the rest of the speech is some fucking word salad alphabet soup I tell you "AMERICA GREAT AGAIN the democrats are stealing the election I AM THE GREATEST They are stealing it. We won by a lot A LANDSLIDE. Dems don't win by landslides, but the mainstream media, they wont tell you that.

/REPEAT

That better?



He Tweeted that speech, and they attacked while shouting OUR PRESIDENT WANTS US HERE
https://www.printfriendly.com/p/g/DPYcNv (printfriendly to get behind paywall NYT) original : https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/us/capitol-rioters.html

What do you want? Let me know if you've had a brain aneurysm so I can stop talking to you like you're just a dumbass who sold the farm for some magic beans.

Fit the description....except for his height, weight, age, and clothing.
Just like I fit the description of a vandal when I was 12-13 riding the bus to school in my prep school uniform, 130lbs and maybe 5'4", and white...and the description was mid twenties black man, approximately 6' 180 lbs. I was still in custody when they brought him in.

Never trust a word a policeman says, they are professionally trained to be liars, and have fought to the supreme court to secure their right to lie. They know that doesn't include lying about what happened, making up charges, or perjury, but once you're ok with lying, even feel it's an important tool to use to trick innocent suspects into prison, crossing the next line is nothing, just lie about it.
Stating that in court under oath makes me ineligible for jury duty. I got a huge smile from the judge too, seems he doesn't like liars either.

Would be great if there were additional sites we could grab videos from. The more the merrier.

Personally would not want to see a cap on length of videos. John Olivers Last Week Tonight clips generally run over twenty minutes.

Newt,

This is in response to your comment on my statement about Biden needing to lose in '20.

I recently wrote this as a reply to one of my readers (I write under a number of different names in other places).:

Dear <name>,

>I took some time to absorb what you wrote. It's a lot to juggle. The Atlantic has an article in the July-August issue on the worst and best case scenario in CLO defaults. I'll read more.

I read the article you mentioned, and while it's certainly good, it also misses a very important point that explains the mess we're in: the collapse of Lehman and Bear-Stearns, while catastrophic in their own ways, were not the nightmare that caused the Fed to freak out in 2008 -- AIG was. Had AIG gone under and the counterparty default contracts triggered, we'd be on the barter system right now. We came within hours of not having an economy in the western world. The $700b ($.7t) the Fed coughed up to stop this from happening calmed the panic, but did nothing to resolve the underlying issues. These issues continued to compound during the 2011-2020 stock run-up and now we're at the point where the Fed is throwing trillions of dollars at every piece of bad debt they can find just to keep the whole thing from imploding into an economic black hole. It is important to note that in September '19, the credit markets started freezing because of the debt that was already on the books then, -before- CV-19 started rolling, and it took $3t just to get them unlocked again. Absolutely nothing has gotten better since then, and I would argue things have gotten dangerously worse.

In an odd coincidence, the NYT ran an article today about the looming bankruptcy crisis. They're calling for 30-60 days before things start imploding, but I'll stick to my estimate of ~90 days. There's some talk about extending the $600 benefits (we'll see) and chatter about another stimulus check, but that's kicking the can as well as telegraphing how bad things really are. When the Republicans are getting behind free money, you know we're in some uncharted territory. For all intents and purposes, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) -- the reason the Fed is backstopping debt and printing money like crazy -- is the hill the US economy will live or die on. Should the US dollar come unpegged as the world's de facto currency or should inflation begin (and there's already worrying signs this is happening), that's game over.

Please don't take anything I say as the Word of God; please do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Everything I've said is an opinion based on my education, experience and way of thinking. Your mileage may vary.

Here is the article I mentioned: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/business/corporate-bankruptcy-coronavirus.html -- might be paywalled, but clear your cookies for the NYT and you should be able to read it.


>Frankly, it's the physical danger in my area of the States that concerns me. There are the guns and bullying. During some BLM demonstrations in the Midwest, locals were standing around with semi-automatics. I drive a Prius for the fuel efficiency. Pick up trucks enjoy tailgating, trying to intimidate me. This behavior isn't going to change with a change of President but will get worse is we don't change. This ideological push to takeover the country instead of ruling by compromise started around the same time we came to the US in 1981, Reagan's first year. I was so shocked when I heard talk radio for the first time; this wasn't the country I had left in the 1970s.


And now we come to the giant pile of sweaty dynamite that's just waiting for the right shock to set it off. I could give you a prolonged lecture about how this all started in 1978 with California's Proposition 13, or how David Stockman's tragically prescient warnings were blatantly ignored, but Haynes Johnson does a far better job at this than I ever could in his 1991 book "Sleepwalking Through History", as does Kevin Phillips in 2006's "American Theocracy". Honestly, at this point, the prelude is academic. The reality of the situation is that a large swath of adult Americans are appalling ill-educated, innumerate and devoid of even the most basic critical-thinking skills. These people are now locked out of the Information Economy. They lack the most basic skills required to compete in the 21st century job market and thus will watch their standard of living sink into the abyss. These people are not blind to this fact because they're living with the reality of their situation every single day. They're totally without hope, cut off from all avenues of control over their own lives and they feel utterly abandoned by the very people who're supposed to be helping them. The reason you're seeing bullying and behavior like that is because these same people are totally removed from any avenues of recourse and the only people they can take their anger out on are people like you and me. Their anger is being stoked on a daily basis. FOX News and the GOP are experts at this and have a host of boogeymen to keep the anger from being pointed their way: ANTIFA, BLM (black Americans have always made a perfect target), "coastal elites" and, of course, Liberals.

Trump's election was a warning, not an outlier. Trump was the primal scream of these people and Liberals and the Democrats as a whole chose not to listen because they found the sound so abhorrent. The rage will only get worse and the number of people enveloped by this rage will only grow as economic conditions worsen. At this point, it no longer matters who wins in '20. Winning the election will be like winning the deed to the World Trade Center one second after the first jet hit. The damage has already been done and no steps are being taken to repair it; if anything, people are actively making it worse either through ideological blindness, deliberate malfeasance or outright stupidity. It took almost 50 years to get to this point and the endemic issues will not be undone in a single generation, much less a single election. Until the people who voted for Trump feel a sense of real hope, a sense of control over their lives and a genuine expectation of recourse for their grievances, they will keep right on voting for Trump, or people like him.

My unfortunate suspicion is that this country will rip itself to shreds long before those reforms are enacted.

Side note: the fundamental difference between the United States and Europe is that European history has forced the nations of Europe to live with the consequences of their actions. Not so the United States. Europe has suffered for her sins. Not so the United States. The two bloodiest wars in human history were fought on European soil. Not so the United States. The United States has never faced true suffering, nor has it ever had to live with the ramifications of its own actions. Both these facts are about to change and a nation whose character is built on a mythology of individual action and violence is going to have to face reality. The people of this nation are not prepared for this and they will not like it.

Second side note: many people are erroneously comparing the current situation to the Wiemar Republic. This is a lack of historical understanding. A more apt comparison would be to Spain in late 1935.


>As for re-opening, we could have gotten some control if the "leader" had simply donned a mask and used realistic thinking. People could go back to work more safely, wash hands, stay a certain distance. But his hubris led the way, so now we'll have a roller coaster for months and years that will affect the economy even more. France is a good comparison because they were unprepared also, having slashed the public healthcare budget for the last twenty years. But when they laid down the rules, troops patrolled the streets to be sure they were followed. So far, they've flattened the curve (for now), and used different economic incentives, such as paying part of employees' salaries to keep them employed.

At this point, the pace of re-opening is a difference between very bad and much worse. Had $3t been used to pay the yearly salary of every American, we could have saved lives and the economy, but we didn't. The history of 2020 will be littered with "what-ifs". However, the first thing you learn when studying history is that what-ifs are useless because things are what they are and you can't change that. It's already obvious we're going into a second wave. If previous pandemics are any indication of what's to come, this second wave will be many times worse than the first. The wait for a vaccine is indeterminate, but if we're going for herd immunity, ~70% of Americans will need to catch the virus. To date, ~1.5% have. If the US population is ~330 million, ~230 million will need to catch the virus. Call the mortality rate 2%, that means ~4.6 million Americans will die. That's a lot of dead Americans and grieving families.

Take care,

(my actual name)

My mid twenties year old self really enjoyed the original, but I can't be the only one that thinks this trailer looks really bad. Not any funny in the entire trailer...imo.

(edit) i think in the original, Bill and Ted were exaggerations of a group of young people who actually spoke and acted like that. Today you would be hard pressed to find anyone acting like that, especially at the age they are portraying.

Your guy and his cronies literally quote Nazi propaganda, openly support Nazis, openly support and laud dictators while denigrating democracies and democratic process both within the US and in other countries. At the same time a concerted effort has been in effect the past years to stack the courts and public service so heavily with blindly subservient ideologues to the point where laws and the constitution often have no bearing on judicial decisions any more if they impact the president or his allies.

In short, Trump has been engaging in one of the most transparently dictatorial power grabs of the twentieth and twenty-first century.

And you're worried about a report from a news agency known for inaccurate and biased reporting that maybe his opponent might have been involved in something shady (but without any actual evidence to back up their claims)? I mean it's not like Biden personally sees that money. China gives a shitload of money to US universities in general. If you want to connect the dots there, go look at Harvard, they receive a billion dollars a year from China, and yet you'd rather trace a few million because they happened to go to a school with Biden's name on it. Great detective work, Mr. Magoo!

If Trump came out in public tomorrow with a toothbrush mustache and a Nazi armband you'd still support him, wouldn't you?

If it walks like a Nazi, quacks like a Nazi, and supports Nazis, it is a Nazi.

I hope you can fill in the blanks, @bobknight33

I hope it's just that you just don't realize what you've become and you still somehow believe you're doing "the right thing", but honestly your lack of any semblance of integrity strains that perception. The alternatives, that you're intelligent and fully aware of what you're doing, or you're a propagandist for a foreign power who is merely acting in support of his own nation's goals are the less kind (but sadly more likely) interpretations.

"Scientists" who falsify data or skew experiments to get their preconceived results should be ignored and silenced....those who steal from the company they were just fired from deserve jail.

Just read her wiki page...only bat shit crazy conspiracy nuts believe the government and scientific community as a whole conspired to ruin her because she told the truth....She's disgraced because she made repeatedly proven false anti vaccine claims they want ignored, but antivax conspiracy nuts love her. Reality is she's an anti vaxer whose experiments proved to be faked and whose theories are just insane.

Judy Anne Mikovits (c. 1958) is an American anti-vaccination activist, conspiracy theorist and discredited ex-medical researcher. She has made discredited claims about vaccines, coronavirus, and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). As research director of CFS research organization Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI) from 2006 to 2011, Mikovits led a research effort that reported in 2009 that a retrovirus known as xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) was associated with CFS and may have had a causal role. However, the research came under fire, leading to an eventual retraction on December 22, 2011, by the journal Science.

In 2020, Mikovits drew attention online for promoting conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic, via the conspiracist YouTube video Plandemic[6] that were fact-checked and found to be either false or not based on scientific evidence.

Mikovits began to look for XMRV in her Chronic Fatigue Syndrome samples. In late 2008, a graduate student, who subsequently was hired as her technician, obtained two positive results from a group of twenty samples. He and Mikovits successively altered the experimental conditions until all samples gave a positive signal.

In 2009, Mikovits and co-workers reported in the journal Science that they had detected XMRV DNA in CFS patients and control subjects. Negative results were published soon after, disputing Mikovits's findings.

She's a fraud. Why else would Bobby love her so much?

Way too long, didn't watch, but I must disagree with the description.
Population control is hardly removed from the debate. IMO it's just ignored when it's brought up because the vast majority of people won't even consider not having children to the point where when China tried to take action and limit couples to one child the world called them draconian monsters instead of intelligent.
I personally often say I think every problem facing humanity and the planet is a function of overpopulation, and I'm not alone. I admit, I'm rare in that I put my money where my mouth is and had a vasectomy in my twenties before having children. I'm of the belief that no other action could possibly have the positive effect that not adding to the population does, but I also bought a full solar system over a decade back and try to grow most of my own food, and I drive well under 5000 miles a year.
There's no reason to abandon population control in favor of technological fixes or vice versa, indeed I believe maximising both won't fully solve our issues that have taken over a century to create, but I also believe not acting in every way possible to mitigate our damages leads to certain doom for most species.
I also think none of this will make a whit of difference in the grand scheme because way too many people have decided making any lifestyle sacrifices or not wastefully living above their means is intolerable even if it means their children suffer for it.

Love the use of Zoetropes for the video. Well done.


Lyrics..

Check the locks and leave the keys
Mouldy bath masked with Febreeze
Something's dead behind the refrigerator
Some poor fuck will deal with it later

I’ve spent the last ten weeks
Squeezing out the sponge of friendships, plugging leaks
I've talked until there's no more to say
I’m going away
I'm leaving LA
I'm leaving LA

And the tourists say
"Please give me the directions to the Hollywood sign
I always dreamt of coming here to see the Hollywood sign"
But on their way back down we'll ask
"Did you have a good time?"
They'll say "it's just some fuckin' letters on a hill"

I wander through the Bronson Caves
One more OK coffee at the Oaks Gourmet
I'll watch the players at the UCB
Trying to improvise their way out of ennui

Walking trails in the creeping dark
Up to the observatory in Griffith Park
There’s too much light for stars anyway
I’m getting out of this place
I'm leaving LA
I’m leaving LA

And the studio executives who never made a thing
Blaming other for their failures, taking credit for their wins
Wiping the blood of dumb artists from their chins
Singing, "kid you oughtn't take it personally"

On Hollywood and Vine a dime-store Spider-Man
Shouting at a stoned Emma Stone, dressed à la La La Land
And in the distance, in both its glorious dimensions
The sign projects its shadow on the hill

Rushing by machine-gunned cops at LAX
Malfunctioning departure board says we're boarding next
Belt off, shoes off, jacket off, hat
Don't need the attitude, but I quite enjoy the subsequent pat-down
And I’m sat down
As the A380 engine roars
Pushed backwards as this tube of monkeys rumbles forwards

I'm looking forward to another twenty hours on a plane
Nothing but shit films and my brain
I've been going slowly insane
I've seen your sport and I don't wanna play
I'm getting out of this place
I'm getting out of this place
I'm leaving LA

And the actors at Gratitude drinking undrinkable juice
And the agents taking ten percent in their sneakers and suits
And the writers in their Teslas trying to punch up Act One
Driving home on the 101 in the relentless fucking sun
And the needy and the greedy and the hopeless and horny
And the deals done on treadmills at ten to six in the morning
And the Captain's on the PA saying "look for the sign!"
But I find it's just some fuckin' letters on a hill
Just some really ugly letters
On a pretty ugly hill

I'm leaving LA
I'm leaving 'ell