August 15, 2020

At the Saturday Night Café...

IMG_9098

... you can talk about anything you like.

I photographed the water lilies of Lake Mendota at 1:27 in the afternoon today. No sunrise picture today. I skipped the ritual for a couple inadequate reasons.

39 comments:

ga6 said...

https://twitter.com/i/status/1294736792856535040

Joe Smith said...

"I skipped the ritual for a couple inadequate reasons."

-- Hangover?
-- Meade feeing frisky?

Both adequate reasons : )

Sprezzatura said...

I don’t worry too much about my shortcomings re situations when I realize that I have inadequate reasons to justify my lameness. Obviously, I do worry. Cause it’s not good to fail. But, I know the problem occurred, and I know how to fix it in the future.

But I’m always on the lookout for my being wrong/lame w/o my comprehending the existence of the wrongness, hence no evaluation is attempted re having or not having an adequate justification.

Anywho, based on one comment getting through today, it looks like I’m un-banned again. For, what, the fiftieth time?

Testing.....

MadTownGuy said...

COVID-19 'has taken on a political tone,' Fauci warns (Huffpost)

It seems inconceivable,” he told interviewer Deborah Roberts of ABC News. “Take a deep breath and think about it: When you’re trying to promote public health principles to save people’s lives ... that there’s such divisiveness in the country that [it’s] interpreted to be so far from your own way of thinking that you actually want to threaten the person.

He added: “It’s tough for me to figure that out except to say, ’Boy, I hope we get past this divisiveness in our country. ... [There’s] just no way that our society can really function well and go along that way. We’ve got to get past that.”

Fauci said it would be helpful if people would think about health and safety measures not as “blocking” a return to more normal times but as “gateways” to getting there — one thoughtful, careful step at a time.

He also seemed to take subtle shots at Donald Trump...
yadda yadda yadda.

"More normal times" appears to mean The New Abnormal, where masks and quarantine and lockdown may be invoked at any time, for any reason.

wildswan said...

Please keep the sunrise going. (Thought water lilies are great) (But they won't be there in winter.) (But the sun will.)

stevew said...

" I skipped the ritual for a couple inadequate reasons."

Oh dear, that is how it begins.

Is Milfoil a problem at Mendota? Water lilies are gorgeous and reportedly one approach to controlling the evil water weed.

We had post Kyle seaside violence here on the southern Maine coast today. Moderate winds and high surf. Spectacular. Season high tourist volume too. The local business folk are pleased. Mask wearing was sporadic. Community Resource Officers were over stretched.

Michael K said...

Chicago having another summer Saturday night.

Ken B said...

A Seattle brewery is printing anti cop messages on their beer cans.

traditionalguy said...

The President’s baby brother, Robert Trump died today. Time to pray for our President.

Original Mike said...

Blogger Michael K said..."Chicago having another summer Saturday night."

"Two protesters were treated for injuries and 17 officers were treated for injuries, CPD said."

Inga's people.

Mark said...

Jacob is dead.

And Jack being Jack, because of him, another two dozen people are killed and The Man in Black is in a position to get off the Island and destroy the world.

Way to go Jack(ass).

walter said...

Michael K said...Chicago having another summer Saturday night.
--
More Summer of Glove?

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Mike Pence said, "we have already created more jobs in the last three months than Joe Biden and Barack Obama created in their eight years in office."

Settle down big boy. Settle down. It's over.

Sprezzatura said...

“A Seattle brewery is printing anti cop messages on their beer cans.”

Did it have a picture of Ron Willis? The “Officer Patrol” (official job title) who grossed more than $414,000 (not including benefits, but including a little bit backpay) last year?

Or was there jabber re: 1) the median pay of $153,000, 2) the 374 folks making more than $200,000, 3) the budget of $409 million bucks, 4) Blue Flu resulting in citizens (who are paying the bills) suffering?

Anywho, those POS beer folks should STFU and be happy that the cops are ready to protect and serve them, as long as we can bump the average pay to $500,000 plus benefits, and the top payed Officer Patrol should be making at least two million a year. If you loser citizens don’t like it = get ready for Blue Flu, and you can suffer, maybe die.

BTW, seems like the military should get in on this extortion game. Are there a lot of Officer Patrol folks in the military that are getting close to half a million a year? Why not? They got way more fire power than city police. Weird that the military doesn’t shake down citizens. Anywho, unrelated, I hear the NYPD union is making history by endorsing DJT (you know, that’s the guy who brought peace to UAE, which is the important info re the US Fed administration, according to (not at all deranged) Althouse.)

bagoh20 said...

It was north of 110 degrees today here in Vegas, as usual. I had a crew putting in a new patio and sidewalk starting at 5 am this morning when the cement truck arrived. None of us trusted the driveway to hold the weight of the truck, so they had to wheelbarrow it in manually. They laid in all the concrete and spread it out, but when they tried to finish it, it was already cured. It turns out the cement company mistakenly used hot water to mix the concrete. What the hell?

The concrete company agree to replace the concrete, but my contractor will have to break it all up and haul it away before redoing the whole job from scratch. I never insisted on this, although I would have. He immediately offered to do it over without any discussion. There are ways other contractors would have tried to cover it up and avoid all that extra work, leaving me with a short term finish, but eventually a mess in a few months when it disintegrated. I already gave this contractor jobs in the past, and he usually gives me good prices, but I never haggle with him. I accept his first price, or I pass, but he's got a customer for life now. I know what these things cost, and his original quote would have made him him a nice profit, but this will wipe out half of it. Good honest people are treasures to be held on to when you find them.

While the contractors were doing this, I was replacing a pool skimmer myself. Don't do that yourself. It's a bear of a job, busting out 30 inches deep of concrete, just to get the old one out took me all day with a jack hammer in 110 degrees. I lost 5 pounds in about 13 hours of work. Probably all water though. I'm going to use it as a start to lose some weight going forward.

bagoh20 said...

Fauci has kept his streak going with epidemics by fucking up another one. He's the epitome of an "expert". His recommendations and inability to understand balance and trade offs will kill far more than the disease. He seems to be quite dumb. Trump has a new guy, and he is making a lot more sense.

Have you noticed that we have more covid cases and deaths than ever, and nobody seems to care much, becuase everyone now knows the numbers and the panic are bullshit.

Mary Beth said...

ga6 said...

Thanks. I had seen the video without an explanation of who he was yelling at. I wasn't sure who he was calling a Grand Wizard.

I'm just going to say again, if everyone had a built-in yard sprinkler system that could be turned on from inside homes, homeowners would have a way to fight back against the noise. Also, it would be hilarious.

gadfly said...

Paragraph 2 of John Durham's criminal investigation of Kevin Clinesmith asserts that "on July 31, 2016, the FBI opened a Foreign Agents Registration Act (“FARA”) investigation known as Crossfire Hurricane into whether individual(s) associated with Donald J. Trump for President Campaign were witting of and/or coordinating with the Russian government." One individual investigated was as a result was Carter Page. But the investigations into Carter Page's contact with the Russians actually began three years earlier. Carter Page was not acting as an an unregistered foreign agent - but he was obviously continuing to have secret talks with Russian authorities. The FBI has made it clear and the Inspector General considered Crossfire Hurricane to a be counterintelligence operation. The Southern District of New York also opened a counterintelligence operation against Page, calling him "Male-1."

Long story short, the FBI email investigation, which has turned up no criminal evidence against Pete Strzok and Lisa Page discovered that Clinesmith was among the group of investigators who just happened to dislike Donald Trump - a very understandable attitude. So Robert Mueller immediately relieved Strzok, Lisa Page and Clinesmith from participation in the special counsel's investigation.

However, evidence evolved that in preparing the third and final renewal of Carter Page's FISA monitoring that Clinesmith changed the text in a single email presented to the court as evidence. Meanwhile Page had already been investigated in 2013 and was added FISA monitoring because of his continued suspicious actions. This was automatic 3rd renewal time which was likely not well read by the FBI or the Judge.

But Kevin Clinesmith owned up to his email faux pas and pled guilty to a single count. But the question remains as to why John Durham wants to claim Crossfire Hurricane related to FARA violations instead of counterintelligence? I would suppose that Billy Barr and Don Trump know what October surprise is afloat. A final fact: Durham's investigation of the FBI has taken more time to turn up nothing major when compared to the well-run Mueller probe (which did indeed find evidence of Trump involvement with the Russians).

Mark said...

It's Mary Ann on The Invaders!

bagoh20 said...

Where do you think a black family with teenage children would be safer: a black neighborhood in Chicago or a town full of white racists who revere the history of the confederacy, and have a local chapter of the KKK?

bagoh20 said...

Antifa dropped into Sturgis for the biker rally. They needed the cops to save them from kicking a lion. Defund the police!. Not right now today, but tomorrow, we should to do that, after I get home to Mom and have a PB&J sandwich and milk.

madAsHell said...

I spent the weekend with the in-laws in the central Oregon desert. Close to freezing at night, and 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the afternoon. You adjust windows, shades, doors and gas fireplaces as the day goes by.

My brother-in-law has a wife. There are no adjectives to describe her.

Around 1PM yesterday, she requested that I turn off the gas fireplace.

"It's easy!" I said.

"The gas valve is in the wall adjacent to the fireplace. It's on the left. Just close the valve."

"I don't know which way to turn the valve! I need you to do it!!" she responded.

"GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME!!! Nobody is that stupid!!".

Incompetence as a tool to control. It seems to work on my brother-in-law.

MadTownGuy said...

Fixing the impasse over the sec I'll nd round of stimulus payments isn't a priority but forcing a vote on the USPS is?

Democrats seriously considering bringing House back into session next week over USPS issues

h said...

Re chicago: "Two brothers and another man, all with felony backgrounds, allegedly helped clean out an Apple store near Halsted Street and North Avenue in Lincoln Park. When police pulled over their blue Chevy Tahoe, they found $17,000 worth of iPhones inside. . . ."

What's that, like 10 iPhones? Maybe fewer, like in the old days reporting drug busts. "The police recovered 2 iPhones with an estimated street value of $17,000."

Or knowing the press these days, "The police recovered 1000 iPhones with an estimated street value of $17,000."

tim maguire said...

Remember when Trump tried to clean up voter rolls and Democratic governors successfully sued to stop him? He should be hitting that hard right now as Democrats push for mail-in voting. One unintended consequence is that it would have made mail-in voting feasible, but Democrats made sure it didn’t happen.

We should be outraged at how under-funded and inadequate our voting systems are. And both parties are to blame, despite Trump’s thwarted effort at improving the problem.

Fritz said...

Looks like snakehead country. Have the Chinese Frankenfish made it to Wisconsin yet?

tim in vermont said...

There was huge sewage dump into Lake Champlain from Vermont. I have been spending summers here for a couple decades and I have never seen anything like it. We are many miles from Burlington, a city of which Bernie was mayor, he could have fixed this, and while they have gigabit ethernet paid for by the city, they still don’t have adequate sewage and storm water runoff management. Anyway, here, miles from Burlington, the lake is a sort of pea green and has an off smell. I went out in the boat to water a couple of hundred feet deep and it was only slightly better there.

Apparently there was a power failure during a storm and they were unable to close a gate on some dam or something. Million to one chance that there would be a power failure during a storm, so you have to let that one pass, right?

tim in vermont said...

"Clinesmith changed the text in a single email presented to the court as evidence.”

Ha ha ha ha! The only thing he was gulty of was what he pled in the deal. That’s how the world works! They used that concocted evidence to spy on Trump because they didn’t have real evidence. Now tell us why it was OK to use a dossier that was cooked up by a Ukrainian who worked in a Democrat think tank in DC and none of it ever came from “Russian spies.” At least that part clears Hillary on Russian collusion, even if she did take hundreds of millions from Putin cronies

You are going to have to accept some day that your anti Trump obsession has put you in bed with a bunch of people that make Dick Nixon look like a Boy Scout.

tim in vermont said...

I was reading a Henry James story yesterday “A Landscape Painter” which was about a painter who adored "in all her moods and tenses” Lake Mend... No, not really, he was talking about the ocean in New England, but it still made me think of Althouse.

Another line that brought Althouse to mind was when the painter was disappointed that the woman he had taken an interest in could only say about his paintings how wonderful they were, how pretty. He said that he had taken her for a woman of more discerning intellect.

OK, a third line was when he described a character as “a trump of a woman” in a way today we would say “a peach of a woman.”

Fritz said...

tim in vermont said...
There was huge sewage dump into Lake Champlain from Vermont. I have been spending summers here for a couple decades and I have never seen anything like it. We are many miles from Burlington, a city of which Bernie was mayor, he could have fixed this, and while they have gigabit ethernet paid for by the city, they still don’t have adequate sewage and storm water runoff management. Anyway, here, miles from Burlington, the lake is a sort of pea green and has an off smell. I went out in the boat to water a couple of hundred feet deep and it was only slightly better there.

Apparently there was a power failure during a storm and they were unable to close a gate on some dam or something. Million to one chance that there would be a power failure during a storm, so you have to let that one pass, right?


Happens in Baltimore every time it rains. It's raining today.

Jersey Fled said...

"The average salary for a police officer with 2 to 3 years of experience, Bachelor Degree, and 3 selected qualifications is $54,151 per year in the United States."

Rusty said...

If you follow the Fox River down from Burlington Wisc. to ,say, Yorkville Ill. you'll see every town has it's own dam or series of dams. Some of those dams were for industrial power. Like the windmill factories in Batavia. But they were all used for sewage control. The Fox is a very shallow river even with dams you can walk across it in most places. Hence the dams to control the stink.

tcrosse said...

Show me the Monet.

Rory said...

"Or was there jabber re: 1) the median pay of $153,000,"

Translation to normal: Democrat voters elect Democrat politicians, who sit down with Democrat union reps to make a sweetheart deal to the disadvantage of Democrat voters, who respond by burning down the city.

mockturtle said...

madAsHell observes:
Incompetence as a tool to control. It seems to work on my brother-in-law.


Is was an effective tool for my husband when it came to household chores.

Paco Wové said...

Personally witnessed Mask Unpleasantness for the first time yesterday, in the Hy-Vee liquor store. From what I could tell, a somewhat tubby middle-aged masked guy made an obscene gesture and directed a disparaging comment at a wiry young maskless guy, who didn't take it at all well, and spent the next 5 minutes or so loudly and profanely challenging mask guy to a fight outside the store while everyone else studiously ignored him. Mask guy paid and left first, so by the time maskless guy got outside, mask guy was nowhere to be seen (as I assumed would be the case – and probably all other parties as well).

Michael K said...

gadfly seems to be going nutso with his TDS obsession.

The Sturgis thing was pretty funny. I wonder what prompted the Antifa idiots to go there ? They had one sign about the Governor of SD. SD is one place where the money train might get investigated. Somebody is funding this but they usually stay near friendly DAs who will not do the work to trace the funding.

mockturtle said...

Show me the Monet.
Nicely done, tcrosse!

Kai Akker said...

I really love that picture. Another great summer picture.

@Tim Maguire -- you make a good point in the first half of your 6:01 post (as usual). Not sure I agree with your conclusion, though. Why couldn't states cut the elections budgets by 50% and go to the mechanical machines? Couldn't be hacked. Never heard of any reliability problems. Why did we get rid of them, again? Everything since those have had problems and glitches, in my experience.

Right now the media are really going to town on the idiocy of Trump's fears that mail-in voting will be chaotic and vulnerable to all sorts of crookedness. The media's default is that there has never been any election rigging to begin with, so Trump is just totally wrong yet again. I heard this theme an unpleasant half-dozen times on all-news radio yesterday while driving somewhere.

We know better in Philadelphia. In Philadelphia, election fraud is a constant, not an exception. Look no further than the arrest a couple weeks ago of Ozzie Myers.

Who?

C'mon, Ozzie Myers, onetime Congressman first busted in the Abscam sting in the'80s and did time. Famous locally for his pure Sou'Philly quote on the tapes, "Money talks, bullshit walks." Ozzie's life of public service seems to have specialized in bribery and election fraud. At 77, he is currently accused by the FBI of having elections judges in his pay; one pleaded guilty so far. He adjusted the totals to whatever Ozzie ordered, according to the Feds. He did this by standing in the machines when no one was watching and voting as fast as possible for the specified candidates. By himself, he accounted for 22% of the votes in his division on one election. The charge covers only primary elections; that's probably because those are the ones that matter to the Democratic Party monopoly.

Doubt Ozzie was alone in this general enterprise. Other Corrections alumni have continued to service the local political scene as "consultants," and some were powerful enough that even supposedly clean "reform" (lol) candidates would hire them. I doubt there has been one Philadelphia election in the last 50 years that was entirely clean of fraud. Probably that should be 100 years.