Monday, January 22, 2024
Happy Hour
Have a few drinks and feel the warm glow of generosity!
If you don't like paypal, there's also Patreon:
If you don't like paypal, there's also Patreon:
Middlebrow Bullshitting
You know the skill. You can talk about the book you haven't read, but maybe you read a review of it. You have enough knowledge of current events, major authors, the latest films, pop history, and similar, that if these things come up at a party you can participate in the conversation.
It doesn't necessarily involve lying, or claiming expertise where you don't have it, but instead a keen sense of what you know, and how some of it fits together. More importantly, you have a sense of what you don't know so you don't put your foot in it.
Mars is the 4th planet, not the 5th. The red one. You know planets have different gravity strengths, but you can't quite remember if Mars has more or less, so you don't bring it up.
Dickens is an author, 19th century. Tale of Two Cities, Christmas Carol, not sure about the rest. Certainly not Moby Dick.
That kind of thing.
It's funny how our rich tech overlords - Elon Musk and the gang - just fail at this miserably. And they just keep tweeting it out.
It doesn't necessarily involve lying, or claiming expertise where you don't have it, but instead a keen sense of what you know, and how some of it fits together. More importantly, you have a sense of what you don't know so you don't put your foot in it.
Mars is the 4th planet, not the 5th. The red one. You know planets have different gravity strengths, but you can't quite remember if Mars has more or less, so you don't bring it up.
Dickens is an author, 19th century. Tale of Two Cities, Christmas Carol, not sure about the rest. Certainly not Moby Dick.
That kind of thing.
It's funny how our rich tech overlords - Elon Musk and the gang - just fail at this miserably. And they just keep tweeting it out.
A lot of it's just the normal right wing internet stuff like HITLER WAS A LEFTIST, ACTUALLY, and other assorted bits of nonsense history, but they fill their brains with that stuff instead of anything else.
Good Stuff
Go Dark Brandon.
The effort to expand access to contraception involves several measures. Federal agencies are issuing guidance that would make no-cost contraceptives more available under the Affordable Care Act and take similar actions to expand contraception access for federal employees. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra also plans to send a letter to health insurers instructing them of their obligation to provide no-cost contraceptives, according to a memo the White House sent to reporters Sunday.
The federal health department also announced a new team dedicated to enforcing its interpretation of a law, known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA, which the Biden administration has said requires hospitals to provide emergency abortions nationwide, including in the 21 states where the procedure is limited or banned.
Can't Park
This is Europe, but the need to restripe parking lots isn't limited to Europe.
New cars in the EU and UK have grown 1cm wider every two years, the Guardian can reveal, driven by large luxury SUVs whose sales show no sign of slowing.Typical US off street spots are quite a bit wider than 180cm, but larger cars are more likely to encroach on the actual roadway from on street spots.
...
New cars have become so bloated that half of them are too wide to fit in parking spaces designed to the minimum on-street standards in many countries, the report found. The average width of a new car in the EU and UK passed 180cm in the first half of 2023, having grown an average of 0.5cm each year since 2001.
Lunch
Or support the site for free, simply by buying stuff you would have bought anyway! (Ad, I get a commission).
ELECTION YEAR WINTER FUNDRAISING WEEK
Can't believe we're already here again. Every other year is an "election year" in our crazed system but of course the big ones are every four years. Even when I was a young blogger in the Bush era it seemed like 4 years was an eternity, but now 4 years seems to pass every 5 months or so.
Pitch is the same as always: this blog is what it is but if you get some amusement out of it, have extra money, and especially if you give money to similar things because they're paywalled, consider giving a bit to help keep my blogs mighty and strong.
I don't fault people for putting up paywalls, but everyone talks nostalgically about the old blog era (killed by various things), and it can't return as long as everything is paywalled.
Roughly speaking, revenue has been pretty constant in nominal terms for years. But we know how Dark Brandon caused the inflation! So not so much in real terms.
Thanks to all!
If you don't like paypal, there's also Patreon:
Or you can read for free!
The Good Republicans
The reporter/pundit early promotion of Meatball Ron happened because they desperately wanted notTrump to appeal to Trump voters. Basically they bet on "a guy just like Trump but without all the violence and crimeing" to prove that the fine real Americans they have spent 8 years conducting deep anthropological studies about and telling us to hug at Thanksgiving wouldn't support THAT Donald Trump.
And lol of course they would.
And lol of course they would.
8 years later they still mostly don't describe Trump supporters as they are, much as they pretended the TEA PARTY was actually about taxes and small government. The people whose job it is to explain things to you have spent decades pretending to believe things are other than they are.
Meatball Ron
We here at Eschaton The Blog have long made fun of the press for promoting Ron DeSantis. There are a lot of hilarious headlines on pieces and columns, but I decided to go re-read a couple to see if they are as funny as the headlines make them seem now.
A stellar entry is Frank Bruni's:
Reading the column, the peril mostly seems to be "being wrong about Ron's chances." Bruni claims he doesn't like DeSantis, but exactly who is this column directed at? It isn't written for Republican primary voters, convincing them Ron is bad, but instead it's about how Ron could beat Trump, so don't write him off!!!
A stellar entry is Frank Bruni's:
The hilarious bit is Bruni's central point, which is that, contrary to the views of other nattering nabobs, Ron's incredible discipline in just taking Trump's insults and never criticizing him is Smart, Akshually.
How'd that work out?
Bruni links to another piece by Nate Cohn, which informs us that Ron is incredibly popular and that this is absolutely unprecedented for someone like him at that stage. Yah, Nate, he had a couple of years of fawning press coverage setting him up. It's a complete mystery how that happened.
In this narrow but important respect, Mr. DeSantis has a lot more in common with Barack Obama or Ronald Reagan than Mr. Walker or the other promising first-time candidates who did not live up to high hopes in recent years, like Kamala Harris, Rick Perry or the retired general Wesley Clark....There’s no need to speculate about whether Mr. DeSantis is the “next” Reagan or Obama. Not even Mr. Obama and Mr. Reagan were clearly Obama or Reagan at this stage. And Mr. Reagan and Mr. Obama differ from Mr. DeSantis in the very same way that he’s purportedly similar to Mr. Walker, as both Mr. Obama and Mr. Reagan rose to prominence by commanding the national stage in famous speeches during their party’s campaigns in 1964 and 2004.
How did Ron rise to such prominence without any good reason at all? Unknowable.
The unwillingness of the press to admit that they are actors - powerful actors - in these dramas is maddening.
Sunday, January 21, 2024
Who Radicalized You, Ron DeSantis Staffers
Repent and all will be forgiven.
“We’re going to win Iowa,” DeSantis declared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Dec. 2.
But in the week before the all-important caucuses, Scott Wagner, the recently installed head of the super PAC, was doing something that aides found puzzling: He was literally doing a puzzle.
In the headquarters of Never Back Down in West Des Moines, Iowa, Wagner was, according to some of his staff, spending a significant amount of time in the precious final few days constructing a peaceful 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of a landscape.
Click through for the picture. Amazing stuff.
My brief google search tells me Wagner is a "college buddy" of DeSantis. Another fine graduate of Yale University.
And Meatball Ron is dropping out.
What's Missing, Nick
There's an obvious deliberate hole in this piece from Nick Confessore about the motley crew of racist bigots in the "anti-DEI" campaign. None of this works without prominent media members catapulting the propaganda, and it therefore defies belief that in all of the unearthed documents and correspondence, there is nothing about media strategy or "like-minded allies" who happen to be Nick's colleagues and bosses, or other journalists, editors, pundits, and media personalities.
He's just erased them. As I said, none of this works without journalists, so where are they?
He's just erased them. As I said, none of this works without journalists, so where are they?
Cars Are Expensive
Not a new insight, but so many people can't imagine a built environment without them so it is unfathomable that in some places the cost is an option.
Honestly I don't know how one-car-per-adult households manage. It's a huge expense!
A new report finds that, when transportation costs are factored in, Texas’s biggest metros aren’t the bargain they often claim to be.Can always quibble with the precise numbers, and apples-to-apples comparisons on housing are impossible, but the general point is that it costs several hundred dollars per month to own a car and it's a big cost saving if you don't have to have one!
Honestly I don't know how one-car-per-adult households manage. It's a huge expense!
Good Ideas
My very short opinion about election year 2024 is:
You have to have terminal DC Dem brain to think something like that is going to excite people! And terminally online Dem brain to think you can get people excited about it by yelling at them!
- You can't keep pretending that the thing happening on the front pages isn't happening, or that somehow people are wrong for caring about it [why are you so obsessed with Israel??? say people writing their 700th piece about Israel]
- You can't expect people to get excited about modest improvements, even if they are improvements. One can accept the very real constraints of our political system - even, perhaps, understand them - while also wondering why it is the apparent outer limit of what Biden wants.
This is the apotheosis of "do good things - but only for the needy - but only for the DESERVING NEEDY who are therefore not all that needy" and thinking it is both smart policy and politics. Student loan debt forgiveness for people who solve an impossible puzzle.
Saturday, January 20, 2024
All Timer
This, from the NYT editorial board, is definitely in the Hall Of Shame (see what I did there???) of stupid punditry. 
They aren't smart people.
Ignore The Smell In The Corner
Just keep the party going as planned.
New - Biden advisers brainstorm 2024 policy pitch, w/ 3 key messages emerging:
— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) January 20, 2024
1/ Biden reined in prescription drug prices & wants to do more vs Big Pharma
2/ Biden is taxing corporations & wants billionaire tax
3/ Crack down on price gouging/junk feedhttps://t.co/1CwRiGNv0K
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)