I gotta squirrel story.
So when I lived in Mountain View, for Christ only knows what reason, the idiots in charge of power put this big-ass transformer thing on the corner of my property. The thing hummed with menace and I knew that shit wasn't right. But I didn't worry none because there was a big green metal cover over it that provided the same protection against horrendous death that a box of Kleenex would have provided the World Trade Center on 9/11.
One day, I'm standing on my balcony and drinking a beer. I mighta been stoned, too, only there's no 'mighta' that day. I'm watching the whorehouse across the street (really) and generally buzzing when I see a squirrel on the lawn. I hate squirrels. A motherfucking squirrel ate my bar fridge and fucked me outta the $50 I was selling it for on Craigslist (really).
Anyway, I got this longneck of Bud in hand and I'm working out whether I can brain the goddamn rodent with it when the neighbor's cat come rippin' ass from under the balcony and goes after Skippy.
Well here's some amusement!
The squirrel is running for it's pointless life and the cat is banking like a F-16 chasing an Iraqi MIG and I've already got $10 down on the kitty with a $3 over/under. I already know how this was gonna end and I was rootin' for it every step of the way.
Only it didn't.
The goddamn squirrel found the ONE way to get under that green metal cover I mentioned previously. The cat stops in amazement and I'm all pissed because I've been gypped outta Wild Kingdom's money shot.
A second later there's a flash like Ivy Mike going off from under the cover and an a concussive BOOM!! The fucking cover blasts off like a Space-X project gone horribly wrong -- or, in this case, delightfully right.
The cat jumps like 5 feet in the air and an arc of turds flies outta its butt, the cover returns to earth as a traffic hazard in the middle of Latham St., and the squirrel is basically vaporized. And now I'm the happiest motherfucker in Mountain View because dude, that shit was AWESOME!
I call out, "Babe! You won't believe what just happened!" 'cause you gotta totally share shit like that.
Then I realized everything is TOTALLY silent, like Little House on the Fucking Prairie silent.
"The power's out," my wife responds.
And it STAYED out for like two goddamn days while the putzes from the power company had to rewire pretty much everything that blew up.
Honey Badger didn't give a shit because Honey Badger'd copped an oz right before this shit happened. And as Fat Freddy taught us, "Dope will get you through times of no power better than power will get you through times of no dope." Or some shit like that. I dunno, I'm totally fucking baked right now.

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)

I member after 9/11 someone calling security for a gym bag left in the men's bathroom of a secured corporate building in Melbourne, FL. Yep, Bin Ladens hit list: 1. World Trade Center, 2. Pentagon, 3. Third floor building C, Melbourne, FL

Was the Washington Post in an article on September 18, 2001 when it wrote the following?

In Jersey City, within hours of two jetliners’ plowing into the World Trade Center, law enforcement authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/09/18/northern-new-jersey-draws-probers-eyes/40f82ea4-e015-4d6e-a87e-93aa433fafdc/?postshare=7281
448290025183&tid=ss_fb



Colbert's Leftist Comedy Puts CBS in Ratings Rut now in 3rd place. Guess not what real Americans want.

The clip from 0:34 to 0:44 uses video of the plane striking the World Trade Center on 9/11 and that was painful for me to watch. Some of you may want to skip that bit. I found the rest of the video quite funny.

Here is the documentary 'Man On A Wire' about his world trade center tight rope walk. It's a brilliant film. Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 100% http://dai.ly/x20yzwx

Congratulations! Your video, 1 World Trade Center Elevator Time Travel, has reached the #1 spot in the current Top 15 New Videos listing. This is a very difficult thing to accomplish but you managed to pull it off. For your contribution you have been awarded 2 Power Points.

This achievement has earned you your "Golden One" Level 21 Badge!

Your video, 1 World Trade Center Elevator Time Travel, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Oops, pasted same link twice... meant to *related=http://videosift.com/video/Building-the-World-Trade-Center-Towers-720p-HD

Building the World Trade Center Towers (720p HD) has been added as a related post - related requested by oritteropo.

Prefabricated construction has a long history both in China and the west, and to some degree almost every modern building uses the technique. There is a video on here about the construction of the Empire State building for instance, and the WTC twin towers were quite prefabricated too. (*related: Steel erecting on the Empire State Building -1930s, Building the World Trade Center Towers 720p HD)

It was particularly popular in ancient Rome, and combined with the use of cranes and concrete their construction times weren't that different to the modern era (actually sometimes faster, I think the planning process must have been more streamlined).

The standardised look of ancient Chinese buildings is for the same reason, the parts were standardised to make prefabrication easier, certainly by the Ming dynasty if not earlier - see http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/705 for instance.

This particular building just does a particularly good job of it.

Seeing as how the discussion is about the widespread use and ownership of guns, your comparison is illogical. Would it not stand to reason that incidences in which planes were purposefully flown into buildings would increase if piloting licenses were no longer mandatory? Seeing as how accidental death by firearms as been represented in the relevant statistics, I suppose one wouldn't even be required to include the prerequisite of purposeful, either.


>> ^jimnms:
You can't pick out a small portion of a larger statistic to base your argument on, you need to take into account the whole picture. That's like saying 2001 was a slow year for terrorism, if you don't count the World Trade Center attacks.

>> ^L0cky:
I looked at a lot of sources, including CDC. They have a helpful compilation of their stats in the form of their CDC's 2007 chart book. It shows that firearm related deaths and poisoning are always less than motor vehicles; firearms are more likely to cause an early death; while death from poison is more likely to get you in middle age (possbily this includes long term effects of poisoning, ie working with hazardous materials when they were younger?).
It also doesn't show non death injuries; nor can the stats reflect the fact that every household has potential poisons while around half of households have firearms.
I took a look at the pdf, and while the charts are nice, they cover various date ranges and present their results in different formats, and I think you're misinterpreting them. What I did was use the search feature and look at the raw data. You can also search for non death injuries, but gun related non deadly injuries, accidental or intentional, doesn't even make the top 20, and it doesn't show anything below that.

>> ^L0cky:
In absolute terms it's inarguable that there are a lot of gun related deaths and injury in the US (around 31,000 deaths and 70,000 injuries per year give or take). This doesn't change simply because there are other causes of death and injury.
You just said that your source doesn't show non death injuries, yet now you're claiming 30,000 deaths and 70,000 injuries per year. You claim to be getting your sources from the same place, but the data from the CDC shows that between 1999 and 2010 the average homicide by firearm is 12,807 deaths per year. If you add accidental deaths involving firearms the total comes to 21,146 which accounts for 9.6% of all accidental and intentional deaths (this does not include suicide, illness and disease related deaths).

>> ^L0cky:
Let me be clear, my argument is that non sport firearms don't add anything positive to society that justifies the resulting gun related injury, death and crime. The granting of firearm licenses for hunting and sport should require strict licensing that's based on a requirement of training and testing. Gun control laws should be purposefully strict.
We already have plenty of gun control laws. More laws are not going to stop someone that has no intention of obeying them. You obviously did not read the whole article I linked to as it points out that "93 percent of the guns obtained by violent criminals are not obtained through lawful transactions that are the focus of most gun control legislation.

>> ^L0cky:
I haven't objected to this. My objection is to the suggestion that a societal need to teach children how to use firearms can be used to justify their existence. It's circular logic; and I'd prefer not to live in a society where learning to use firearms is a requirement of safety.
No one said that you need to teach children to use guns to justify their existence. You were a kid once (or still are), and at a certain age didn't you do the opposite of everything your parents said? If there is going to be a gun in a house, even if they are told it's dangerous and not to be played with and you do your best to lock it up and keep it away from them, if they do get their hands on it wouldn't it be better that they knew how to properly handle it so they don't end up adding to the accidental death by firearm statistic? Cars are dangerous too, but we teach our kids how to be safe in and around cars (wear your seat belt, look both ways before crossing street, etc.), why are you so freaked out about teaching a kid gun safety?

Your philosophy that kids shouldn't be taught how to use guns because guns are bad is basically the same as abstinence only sex education, AKA teaching ignorance.

>> ^L0cky:
I'm not stating this, I'm questioning it. You yourself said you own them for self defense.
I said I own guns for many reasons, self defense being one of them. You still seem to be confused about why someone chooses to carry a gun for self defense. It looks to me based on what you've written is that you assume someone carries a gun only to protect themselves from other gun owners. As I already pointed out, only 10% of violent crimes involve the use of a gun. I carry to protect myself from 100% of crimes.

>> ^L0cky:
That has zero effect on the number violent crimes that DO involve the use of a gun.
You can't pick out a small portion of a larger statistic to base your argument on, you need to take into account the whole picture. That's like saying 2001 was a slow year for terrorism, if you don't count the World Trade Center attacks.

>> ^L0cky:
This isn't a useful number unless you can show that those crimes would not have been prevented without guns; and would still have occurred without guns.
I don't know what more you expect, a crime was in progress, a lawfully armed citizen stopped it and it was reported to the police. What your asking isn't possible as the only way to know what would have happened in the other situations is to invent a time machine.

>> ^L0cky:
I guess your point is that gun ownership reduces crime. I'm open to that - if it can be shown more clearly.
What is clear from comparing to other countries, particularly those with comparative gun ownership is that the lack of gun control in the US correlates to an increase in gun related death and injury by an order of magnitude. The problem isn't gun ownership in and of itself; it's gun ownership without lack of appropriate gun control laws.
If guns don't reduce crime, then why do we give them to the police? Once more back to that article you didn't read:

"In 13 states citizens who wish to carry arms may do so, having met certain requirements. Consider Florida, which in 1987 enacted a concealed-carry law guaranteeing a gun permit to any resident who is at least 21, has no record of crime, mental illness or drug or alcohol abuse, and who has completed a firearms safety course. Florida's homicide rate fell following the enactment of this law, as did the rate in Oregon after the enactment of a similar law. Through June 1993, there had been 160,823 permits issued in Florida. Only 530, or 0.33 percent, of the applicants have been denied permits. This indicates that the law is serving the law abiding. Only l6 permits, less than 1/100th of 1 percent, have been rescinded because of the commission, after issuance, of a crime involving a firearm."

>> ^L0cky:
You're right, if guns suddenly vanished tomorrow there would still be crime and violence. However, it would be crime and violence without guns; and I think, that (of itself) is preferable. How could it not be?
Are you fucking serous? Why is a murder with a gun any worse than a knife, baseball bat or even bare hands? A murder is a murder no matter what tool is used to commit it. Other crimes besides murder would be better off without guns, but what part of 90% of violent crimes do not involve the use of a gun did you not understand? If you take away guns from everyone, you're only removing 10% of the tools used by violent criminals, and that doesn't guarantee that violent crime will drop by 10%? In reality you wouldn't be removing anything from criminals because "93 percent of the guns obtained by violent criminals are not obtained through lawful transactions that are the focus of most gun control legislation. So you essentially want to take away every law abiding citizen's right to defend themselves with a gun without doing anything to stop criminals from committing crimes with guns.

>> ^L0cky:
Crime in the UK has reduced dramatically according to The Office for National Statistics between before then (1999/2001) and now, including firearm offences. In Australia assault is up, robbery is down and sexual assault is about the same according to the Australian Institute of Criminology. Homicides involving firearms have continued to decline to their lowest on record.
From your source: "Provisional figures for the year ending June 2012 show that 5,507 firearm offences were recorded in England and Wales, an 18 per cent decrease on the previous year (6,694)." In 1997 when the ban was enacted only 2,648 crimes were reported involving guns. It looks like that ban has worked well.


>> ^L0cky:
I pulled it from the same source you are correcting me with
The CDC - Injury in the United States: 2007 Chart Book, page 24.
Statisticslol
This is where you have misinterpreted the graphs. The vertical portion of that graph is in deaths per 100,000 population. If you dig up the raw numbers from the search engine this is what you'll find:

Motor Vehicle Accident = 22%
Homicide by Firearm = 13%
Accident by Firearm = 0.5%

>> ^deathcow:

I have no doubt that killing people like this and watching their glowing white (infrared cam) body parts get spread over a 400 sq ft area will mess (some of) these pilots up for life!! Just watching the videos alone is enough to make me freaked out.


I was thinking about this the other day. You've of course heard stories of the complete separation from their victims when you talk about bombadiers. I was wondering if stationing Drone pilots thousands of miles from their targets does the same thing. Does it become a video game, just sprites on a screen that don't hold any meaning. It's something to think about but I'm not so sure because as our technology has advanced to keep the "pilots" away from the entire battlefield, the optics has advanced to bring the close up images of the battlefield right to them. It must be an odd feeling, I can't imagine.

Also the people who flew those planes into the World Trade Center are braver than these Drone Pilots. So what the fuck does that say about bravery?

>> ^Yogi:

Chomsky was right...Bush jailed people without trials indefinitely. Obama skips that step and goes straight to murder. It isn't legal, it isn't moral, Obama is worse than Bush and the American Empire is still kicking. We need to put it down here at home if we're going to have a chance at a civilized life.


I'll take a wild guess that everything Cenk is talking about most certainly did happen in Afghanistan and Iraq first during our dear leader "Junior Bush", let alone "during the Obama administration". I won't bother to say any more than that as any president that must inevitable go to war with another nation has failed his people (to some extent, some leaders are given no choice and some are caught off guard--but many use it like it's a fraternal right of the presidency--make war and no one complains) and we WILL be committing murder on the large scale, that will always be a partial description and definition of war; except for a few extraneous and special circumstances were we defend ourselves, but in the end we turn into the monster we tried not to be: WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Korea, Bosnia, Iraq (twice), Afghanistan, South VS. North USA, even the Cold War and are malicious proxy wars...

Trust me this has been around a long time, might as well bring up the every presidents "expenditure" or whatever they ended up calling it in those days and ages. War really is one side murdering the other for not a single good reason between the two, but their own bigotry created by...

...Organizations (like Al Qaeda) are capable of strikes that can affect a city block (a large suicide bomb) typically and in a grand while one that effects perhaps 20 blocks (the World Trade Center, which was felt "afterwards much farther away than 20 blocks, it circled the globe)... But, overall they have an effect on a much smaller section of people. It's hard to decide what to give up sometimes as we see others suffering, but we do wish to help them. At some point though an organization is a small group that becomes a country; like our Republicans and Democrats, two flavors of a one flavor system (unless you like pure batshiat crazy, we have that one too).