Leaker

So, he came in and went off about firing the leakers...
Treasonous, evil, behind the back whisperers.


And then he quits/gets canned.

Was he a leaker, then realized it and self fired?
I think that could be a usable narrative going forward.


This pace of absurdity is brutal...


So, just random cabinet members are doing press conferences now?
Send out the seemingly sane people, tell them to look dour...
(Try to tune out the sound of the whole world laughing.)

Maverick (Pt II)

And McConnell has a sad...

McCain actually went maverick.
Didn't see the coming...
But it does kinda seem like it was an orchestrated flipping of the bird.
What  with McCain inviting reporters to watch the show, on his way to the vote.


And with all of this the hard right folks expose the purity of faith, with exhalations that the source of McCain's cancer is none other than God...
A punishment for the impurity of his conservatism, or something.
That is nice, isn't it?


So, what do you think...
Maybe two months before they give some repeal effort another go?

Here

THE PRIVATES from Amalgamated Picture Co. on Vimeo.

Maverick

I am still marveling at the machinations of the Senate, over the past few days.
The whole of it is stunning...


This guy rides in on his high horse to deliver a speech about bipartisanship.

Votes along party lines to move to debate.

Announces that he won't vote for the bill.

Then votes for the fucking bill...


I mean that seems a lot like some party line bullshit, right there.
War hero, brain cancer, whatever credit you care to give the guy...
That reads more hack than maverick...

MTP

So, senators just voted for a bill with no knowledge of what was in the actual bill...



I mean, that is just good governance right there.

Edgey

Beeser

How about a pic of a lovely BSA?

Wow

Thrasher

You know, Thrasher magazine...

The OG skate rag.

The punk one, compared to all the others...






I am not sure if this photo makes me think Thrasher is more or less cool now.

Hmm

The cross section of folks and their thoughts is kinda interesting...

What

The Tick is back?

With direction from the guy who created it?


I mean, it seems hard to beat the animated series, but you know, it's still the  Tick...

Teleportation

So, I guess teleporting is actually a thing now?
Like, are reproducible, actual event...

As reported by folks at MIT-

To perform the experiment, the Chinese team created entangled pairs of photons on the ground at a rate of about 4,000 per second. They then beamed one of these photons to the satellite, which passed overhead every day at midnight. They kept the other photon on the ground.
Finally, they measured the photons on the ground and in orbit to confirm that entanglement was taking place, and that they were able to teleport photons in this way. Over 32 days, they sent millions of photons and found positive results in 911 cases. “We report the first quantum teleportation of independent single-photon qubits from a ground observatory to a low Earth orbit satellite—through an up-link channel— with a distance up to 1400 km,” says the Chinese team.

Here is a link to the article, if you want to read more.

It makes me think I need to read some quantum mechanics for dummies books...

Collusion Tease

So, I guess today's narrative is that there is no collusion...

But this guy was really hoping to get the chance to do colluding with the super secret, ruskie lawyer gal.
Plus his bro-in-law and his dad's buddy, who actually was on Putin's payroll for a while.

And she left him with some pamphlets about adopting Russian babushkas and blue balled them on the colludifacation.


Is that the story they are going with, today?  Am I getting this right?

Fire Season

It's been a while since I lived someplace that has a fire season.


Think about that...

It's a season, fire season.




Yesterday, I went for a bit of a ramble.
Looping around the Brother John, stopping at some of the lakes up in the mountains
Generally, just poking around some of the things I love about this spot...
And enjoying the cooler air another thousand feet of elevation can deliver.


Heading home, I spotted that low haze, north of town.

It's been hanging in the nineties most days, lately.
Each afternoon brings the wind.
It has been a while since there has been rain.
Things are dry here.

That haze, was from a grass fire, up north of here a ways.
Some little spark that was whipped into a thousand acre fire in the course of an afternoon.


Now this fire isn't really near me, or anything really.
No need for worry, or anything like that, all safe here.

Still, pretty sobering to be reminded how quickly these fires can move/grow.

Rhodey

How about a longish read on the history of democracy in the early days of Rhode Island and what it reveals about our modern political state?

Sounds super fun, right?

Rhode Island’s experiment in egalitarian democracy emerged from economic and political conditions that troubled all the newly independent American states during the 1780s. This is the moment that most textbook accounts of the founding skip quickly over. Ordinary citizens faced a combination of tax hikes and a scarcity of currency, as governments stretched to pay off wartime debts and urban elites passed the costs onto the underrepresented inhabitants of the rural hinterlands. In every state, the postwar economic slump sparked calls for reduced taxation and emissions of paper money to ease the impact of the crisis — measures that would redistribute economic burdens away from ordinary people and towards the wealthy.

If that gets your gears turning, the whole article is over here.

Reproduction

The other day, I was out in public, minding my own business.
Public means people, and there were some there...
Talking.
Talking about personal stuff loudly...

These folks were on a family outing, three generations, with the new grand kid.
Somehow things turned medical in this conversation between the family and some strangers...
And it comes out that the new baby has a hole in it's heart.
Which seems like kind of a big deal?

There were other medical concerns which were more pressing, but back to the heart hole thing...

They weren't surprised by the whole heart hole thing, because it is hereditary.
Seems that generations of the clan have been born with hole riddled hearts...
The story of how hard it was for the previous kids, the side effects, surgeries, expenses and suffering...
That was shared with a startling tone of normalcy.

And there these people were...
With a new baby.
With a hole in it's heart.


I mean, maybe you take a generation off when you have that known scenario?
Maybe that is a signal or sign, or something?
Maybe lay off the baby making for a few?

Or not, I guess...
What is one more generation of infant open heart surgery?
If that is the way you've always done it, why not.


Must be a part of compulsive reproduction thing I just don't get...
Or some god working in mysterious ways thing, that I can't understand?


This probably makes me the asshole, right?

Here