Merry Christmas, if you’re into that sort of thing!

@Weird Eddie

So many times, so many people’s lives hang in the balance of somebody’s momentary spark of decency.

And that’s no way for a democracy to operate. It’s simply unsustainable. I get their tactics: it’s starting eight thousand fires and expecting those bleeding heart libs who care about “those people” to be so busy putting them out they don’t notice them looting the place.

But one thing that bothers me is that none of this upheaval that has clearly been affecting everybody–Trump voters included!– hasn’t translated into at least an appreciation of the bureaucracy that is taken for granted and oh-so necessary. As much as people might grumble about slow lines at the DMV, if you ask any about the necessity for licensing drivers, they’d probably approve. We saw this with health care. Take away the navigators and a whole bunch of people are scrambling to figure out why their health insurance is not covering things like they’re supposed to.

“Government is the problem” or “government should be small enough to drown in a bathtub”, these are empty platitudes that sound good to the Ayn Rand-reading teenager with no skin in the game or the wealthy hedge fund manager who similarly has no skin in the game, but to the rest of us, it’s key that we remind people of the importance of government at every level. The government is us. The bureaucracy is us. Sometimes it can be inefficient, but I’ll take some inefficiency if it still delivers.

@wwth

And the worst of it is that the media will still find a way to handwave it away with their standard “both sides do it” bullshit. I really do put the blame squarely on them for this mess getting to this point. There’s the occasional anchor or reporter doing their job like Rachel Maddow or Chris Hayes or Lawrence O’Donnell, but the fact that the party they should know is full of the world’s worst people is committing a new constitution-violating atrocity every day should have anchors slamming desks and yelling at the next right-wing stooge some higher up invited on the show. The national newspapers should have big bold headlines announcing TRUMP SHREDDING FOUNDATION OF AMERICAN SOCIETY.

But they’re not. Just the same tone as if there was a routine cabinet shuffle. Spineless, gutless empty suits.

someone refers to a group as “sheeple” it’s a sign to never take them seriously, but at this point, it kind of fits the right.

I’m trying, without much success it must be admitted, to coin the phrase ‘gestalt-right’ for that brand of groupthink.

And now the Trumpkins are calling in death threats to Rep. Adam Schiff’s office

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/axios-adam-schiff-death-threats-nunes-memo

I’m sure their economic anxiety made them do it.

Does anyone know of a good snarky live tweet or blog commenting on the state of the union address? I want to know what kind of horrific things Dear Cheeto Leader is sure to say but I don’t think I can bear to actually watch that mess.

Looks like Mr. Kennedy will not be the only one rebutting the SOTU:

Virginia Delegate Elizabeth Guzman to deliver Spanish-language rebuttal to Trump’s address
http://www.richmond.com/news/virginia/government-politics/general-assembly/virginia-delegate-to-give-spanish-language-response-to-trump-s/article_a2ecb4f3-f729-555a-b8cb-8b1fc3ca1ed9.html

That’s the problem,” the source quipped, hinting the President could decide to ad-lib at times during the State of the Union to drive up interest in his speech.

Oh great, normally you just follow audience approval ratings; now we’ve got to keep an eye on DEFCON status.

@wwth

And that’s the outfit that Cheeto Benito calls “Fake News”.

Personal story time. My mom’s second husband was a total dick, but there were a few things that he introduced me to that I still get a kick out of, the two that spring to mind being JAG and Doonesbury. He had a copy of The Doonesbury Chronicles, which was the original treasury that covered from 1970 to… I want to say 1975 or so, and the strips about Watergate were really something to read. They portrayed a Nixon that was afraid of the press and a press that was relentless (to the point that Trudeau actually drew a media scrum in the Presidential swimming pool).

My, how things have changed. Since at least Bush, they’ve settled into the role as just stenographers for the elite. Nothing to upset their advertisers like Boeing or Lockheed Martin. And accusing the GOP of being traitors might just upset those advertisers that rely on continued funding of the party that launched two wars that are still causing problems in the Mid-East.

I saw the Will Farrell sketch where he came back as Dubya, just to remind people that he’s responsible for ISIS. How quickly that guy has fallen through the memory hole, eh, media?

Ah well, at least Zonker Harris provided zany comic relief.

When Obama left the presidency, USD to Euro ratio was ~1.07 to 1.

It is now 1.2421 to 1.

In a year.

And I still remember how low it got when GWB was the sitting president… it, uh, wasn’t really good time in America.

@Katamount:
Yes, Sue-Ann Levy, she who used to call City Hall ‘Socialist Silly Hall’ when David Miller was the mayor, ran in my riding in a by-election. This was to replace the MPP who had resigned in order to take up a position running corporate lobby groups on the waterfront, and then resigned from that when he accidentally killed a bicycle courier (and who apparently has still not learned that the smartest thing he could do would be to just shut up and stop trying to justify himself, considering he was in the news again last week).

When Levy lost to the Liberal candidate, she made a snarky comment about how people were obviously “going to get the government they deserved”. Then she tried to walk it back by saying she didn’t mean any disrespect.

She’s a real piece of work, pretty much aspiring to be a cut-rate Ann Coulter.

And yeah, the whole Catholic School Board thing dates back to when it was still ‘Upper Canada’ and ‘Lower Canada’. Quebec long ago ditched most of this; in fact, in many ways Quebec appears to be leading the country in terms of secularization, thanks to the ‘Quiet Revolution’ of the 1960s. Unfortunately removing the separate school boards here will require an amendment to the provincial constitution.

Actually, the Quiet Revolution is kind of an interesting microcosm of the way that places with official state churches are mostly drifting away from them over time, while the loud religiosity is mostly happening in places like the U.S. that actively avoided state churches.

Kupo,

My mom lives in a condo in what would be thought of as a nice but not super ritzy suburb. The area ranges from middle to upper middle class depending on the neighborhood. She looked into selling a couple of years ago so she could move back to the city but it’s only worth about what she has left on the mortgage (she bought it in 2002 at the start of the last bubble) so she decided to stay put. Clearly people aren’t clamoring for condos in that area. Yet, there’s a gigantic complex of condos in the process of being built just two blocks away from her complex. Obviously creditors and development companies are have gone right back to the irresponsible practices that brought us the crash in the first place.

It’s one thing forgetting the lessons from the great depression. It’s quite another forgetting the lessons from a giant recession driven by a real estate bubble that occurred a mere ten years ago.

I can only hope the timing of the next bubble burst will be similar to the one in 2007/08 and result in a sweeping Democratic election victory while not giving Trump time to fuck things up worse. At least then there could be a silver lining and there will be an almost irrefutable case that weak regulatory changes based mostly on just trusting the FIRE industries to behave of their own accord was a failure and we need a new New Deal instead.

Yes, Levy ran against Hoskins. And lost, because Levy sounded like a rabble-rouser and Hoskins sounded like he knew what he was talking about.

St. Paul’s is an… interesting riding. I mentioned the ‘convicted gun and drug dealer’ pamphlet which was from Lilyann Goldstein previously. It’s also a riding which has had a few cases of cars being vandalized if they had Liberal campaign signs on their lawns.

It’s also still over 100,000 people, so your definition of ‘small’ may vary.

One of my favourite comic strip lines was from an old comic strip called ‘Eyebeam’. Single panel, a whole bunch of people in a line, each of them reminding the one behind them of something (‘Didn’t you used to teach at x school?’ ‘Wait, you want to x school? I met y there.’ ‘Wow, I know her brother at z paper’ …) And off at the side are two of the main characters. One says, “Small world, isn’t it?” To which the other replies, “No, it’s still pretty big. It’s just folded over on top of itself lots of times.”

(Now I’m wondering how many people here actually ever saw Eyebeam. It was an odd strip. And its spin-off, ‘Peaches, Queen of the Universe’ just wasn’t quite as good. I know someone who described the creator as ‘A brilliant cartoonist with the unfortunate delusion that ‘Peaches’ is funny.’)

Ran out of edit time, but the thread on that is of course full of Trumpkins with one of three talking points

1. But her emails!

2. No, it was the Obama administration that was like the Nixon administration!

3. Mika Brezinski is a slut!

Not sure what the purpose of that last one is. I think they still feel betrayed by Joe Scarborough and their reflexive misogyny is kicking in and causing them to take it out on her.

It’s been years but I’ve finally started reading research that motivated my attempt at a career in research. The feelings have been complicated since I had to leave (I could not thrive in a 100 hour a week post-doc workload with my institution’s ability to support an adult with ADHD). It’s nice to feel some of that passion again.

Now I have a dilemma. I think I found something. As in I found a very clear trail to follow that could be a genuine research project. And very strong feelings about what I used to do. I want to email someone but I think I have trust issues with academic science.

The image below is related, my current favorite reality is that every ribosome in our body contains a vestigal relic of the first replicator. Hi LUCA!

Every reading frame is packed with hits for tRNAs and an impressive array of metabolism related to reproducing itself. I’ve bought a guide to metabolic biochemistry and am doing some remedial study. The same for the hadean era and geochemistry.