While they’ve got it apart, they can make sure to use a high quality battery!

I don’t know what kind of vibe I’m giving off, but I always seem to get the “Deepstate, amiright?!” drivers. Okay, that’s a lie… I do know my vibe… I live in a Texas suburb and I’m a cishet white guy who wears cargo shorts and dadcaps and likes sports.

I hate it, but still, this person is taking me somewhere I need to be so I want to be nice, but I can’t quite bring myself to pretend to agree. Unfortunately, a polite “Oh, I’m not sure I’m sold on that” just gets them helpfully trying to probe, “so why would Kamala do a pizzagate if she weren’t a lizard person?”

Fuck me, I need some tattoos.

That one’s not actually a problem. The flag is always “hoist side forward” to symbolize a no-retreat mentality. We shall ignore Vietnam and Afghanistan, and how that goes in the reign of President “why they no helping me?!?” remains to be seen.

I believe the correct adjectives are “spongy” and “bruised.”

“This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women. We cannot make this mistake again.”

I’m pretty sure Dick Cheney and pals needed no particular urging from Israel for that one. If nothing else, it was on its face a complicated issue for Israel that would have left them without a particular desire to spend political capital with the US, though they would have undoubtedly been on board once it kicked off.

Now that said, it certainly does seem strange that any time there is a report of negotiations making progress with Iran or a proxy, this particular Israeli government seems to get stuck in and something violent happens. I think what we have here is an blind and anti-semitic squirrel finding a nut.

“For the warfighter.” I suppose there’s a certain clarity of assholery, but jesus, the marketing direct to Hegseth and Trump’s 80s rom-com bully personas is nauseating.

Also, while it’s always been hypocritical to soft-pedal what the most powerful military on the planet is for, the mere act of opening yourself up to accusations of hypocrisy moves the discussion to a place that culturally asserts some level of civilian control, which also implies some limit to the barbarity. People are inherently assholes and will seek the bottom; lowering the bar in advance just encourages even worse behavior.

I particularly did this when I was in the UK or Japan, but that’s more because I have no faith that I will remember to pick the correct way.

I’m not trapped in here with you. You’re trapped in here with me!

I liked the way they’d introduce non-dinosaurs (and sneakily, the main pterosaur family are not technically dinosaurs either) from the fossil record, like the giant snake. There were definitely WAY worse things that I sat through, but PBS kids of that era had a ton of good shows (and now too? I dunno because it doesn’t have Hatsune Miku and friends so therefore my daughter doesn’t care). She actually still has an “Odd Squad” lore book in her backpack.

Matt Groening is his former brother-in-law. Dinosaur Train was in the rotation when mine was little. It’s not a top-tier “parents will notice the layers” one, but it’s very tolerable and a good show for the littles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_(Simpsons_artist)

It really kicks the llama’s gnu’s ass

I received a metric fuckton of texts that were like, “ZOMG YOU GUYS WE ARE SO REPUBLICAN AND CROCKETT HATES ICE CAN YOU BELIEVE IT-ZORZ?!?!?!?” They seem to trace back to a shady republican group. Apart from a couple of milquetoast Cornyn ones, everything else I got was for various Dem candidates despite my living in a very red zip code.

The campaigns have excellent lists, and somebody on the right wanted blue voters to know how very “terrified” they were of her. The only reasonable alternative is that she ran them herself as a low-grade false-flag, and in either case it made me go ahead and decide on Talarico, though I’d have happily voted for either in the general. I think he’s made such a brand of being a blue christian that he’d probably feel obligated to make separation of church and state an important part of his brand, and he’s speaking very explicitly to the wealth divide in a way she hasn’t.

I do tend to think the dust-up over the Talarico’s Allred comment has at least some truth to it, but while I assume he’s much more calculating than his public persona, even in the worst case the story hit my (admittedly white) ears like someone who assumed that his allyship exempted him from micro-aggressions, rather than his being some cackling hypocrite. He’s got his work cut out for him, but if he can energize the base, recover Trump 2024 Hispanics, and get a couple of percentage points’ worth of red voters to flip or even just say, “meh” and stay home, he’s got a chance.

Realistically, I think the most likely scenario is that we’re looking at a pre-guns Beto campaign that comes close but can’t get over the hump versus an unpopular Republican, but I think he’s the best chance we’ve had since then to flip a seat. All of which is incumbent on elections happening semi-normally.

Rubio’s gonna get fired anyway. He made a speech that that didn’t terrify people in Munich as badly as MAGA speeches usually do, so he got a standing ovation, and Trump HAAAAATES that.

The actual ad, if one is feeling like a fuddy duddy.

I think they’ve both had their issues with where their money comes from, her corporate PACs, him with the Adelson family that’s trying to somehow get gambling legalized in Texas without any Native American reservations and with a Christofascist state government. That said, neither one is a Schumer-style appeaser. He wears a brand of class-conscious social justice theology on his sleeve, throwing the Christian Nationalists’ so-called faith into clear focus, but because of that he’s also very much pitching “electability,” which in Texas right now means “I’m a cishet white guy so maybe some of the racists will stay home on election day.”

She is a firebrand who has made calling out Trump and the gang her full-time job, but her campaign seems to revel more in the idea of pissing off Donald Trump than in letting us know what she’ll do. There is a zeitgeisty element to that, and I think she’d be a more prominent and powerful advocate in Congress, but I think either would slot more into the Progressive wing. Ultimately, either would also be an insane improvement over Cornyn or (gag) Paxton.

Would be remiss of course without mentioning the dustup where a Tiktoker left the Talarico camp for the Crockett camp, saying that Talarico told her he was expecting to run against a mediocre black guy, not a talented black woman. He’s admitted to using the word mediocre about Colin Allred’s prior campaign, and TBF it was extremely mediocre (like Allred knew from day one he had no chance, so why knock yourself out?), but if Talarico did try to add in Allred’s race as (one would hope) a rhetorical flourish, then it was a tone-deaf moment that harmed his credibility in promising to advocate for the black community. “Electability” with white people doesn’t help if you simultaneously depress the vote of the usual 4/9 of Texans who vote blue. I’m as white as Talarico is, but it really gave me pause.

Like a candle in the wind…

The first Fantastic Beasts movie is set in New York, and it makes several appearances in the supporting lore books. Apparently, Americans don’t really like Quidditch, preferring some sort of magical-explosions basketball-ish game. Jeez I wish Joanne weren’t such an awful piece of shit human.

Okay, so I’ll point out that Murray Rothbard and David Gordon are prominent in the “Everything should be completely equal and fair as long as we first enshrine my generations of privilege” Austrian-school economists, beloved of white guys everywhere who never got over their Ayn Rand phase.

Makes it much funnier, actually.

With apologies to the baseball fans in the room…

The definition of woke:

You can’t just be up there and just doin’ a woke like that.

1a. Woke is when you

1b. Okay well listen. Woke is when the woke mob

1c. Let me start over

1c-a. The blue haired liberal is not allowed to say to the, uh, patriot, that prohibits the patriot from doing, you know, just trying to oppress the fringe groups. You can’t do that.

1c-b. Once the blue haired liberal is in the kindergarten classroom, she can’t be over here and say to the patriot, like, “I’m gonna get ya! I’m gonna teach your kids about pronouns! You better watch your butt!” and then just be like he didn’t even do that.

1c-b(1). Like, if you’re about to teach about racist history and then don’t teach it, you have to still teach. You cannot not teach. Does that make any sense?

1c-b(2). You gotta be, pooping in the right bathroom, and then, until you just wash your hands.

1c-b(2)-a. Okay, well, you can have the drag queen, like this, but then there’s the children you gotta think about.

1c-b(3). Okay seriously though. Woke is when the teacher, err drag queen, says or does a thing that, as determined by, when you do a move involving the history and CRT

Do not do a woke please