
... you can write about anything.
blogging every day since January 14, 2004
I always wear a mask when I go outside. But something about it was leaving me anxious and unsettled. I thought about the problem, addressed it, and here is the solution. pic.twitter.com/aUW4jHI3dX
— Steve Martin (@SteveMartinToGo) September 12, 2020
The Merrimack Police Department in New Hampshire is asking for residents to look out for a missing forty pound, four year old African Serval named Spartacus that is a family pet and legally owned and permitted. pic.twitter.com/6Qexuv8cuf
— Only In Boston (@OnlyInBOS) September 11, 2020
Hundreds, if not thousands, of homes have been lost, most of them in Oregon, where an estimated 40,000 people have been evacuated and as many as 500,000 live in evacuation alert zones, poised to flee with a change in the winds. Tens of thousands of people have sought refuge in shelters, with friends and in parking lots up and down Interstate 5 — with emergency responders struggling to create safe shelter for all of them in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. On the outskirts of Portland, a site set up to shelter evacuees had to be evacuated itself as the fire line continued expanding toward suburban towns south of the city. State fire officials said winds had pressed a 36-mile-wide wildfire front toward those outlying Portland suburbs on Thursday, with fire jumping over the community of Estacada and threatening others around the foothills of the Cascade Mountains.... As residents flee fire-ravaged communities, officials have struggled to manage a series of migrations reminiscent of a war zone, with distraught families showing up with little in hand beyond an overwhelming fear that their homes have been lost for good. Emergency responders have only begun to get a sense of how many victims they have and the grueling effort to rebuild that will lie ahead.... On Thursday night, about 2,300 people slept in emergency accommodations provided by the American Red Cross and its partners — 520 of them in traditional mass shelters. Tens of thousands more were crashing with friends or family members. Others were pitching tents in high school football fields or sleeping in shopping mall parking lots — many of them unsure whether they would be displaced for days, or weeks, or more.
The wildfire crisis on the West Coast grew to a staggering scale on Friday, as huge fires merged and bore down on towns and suburbs, state leaders pleaded for firefighting help from neighbors, and hundreds of thousands of people were told to evacuate, including about one of every 10 Oregon residents....
“We have never seen this amount of uncontained fire across our state,” said Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon, where the Beachie Creek and Riverside fires threatened to merge near Portland’s suburbs. Mayor Ted Wheeler of Portland declared a state of emergency on Thursday night, and residents of Molalla, about 30 miles to the south, packed highways as they fled from the approaching fires....
Several law enforcement agencies in Oregon said they had been flooded with inquiries about rumors that activists were responsible.
I have deep compassion for clinical depression, but when it comes to the quarterback of an NFL team, you know this better than I do. It’s the ultimate leadership position in sports. Am I right about that?... You are commanding an entire franchise.... And they’re all looking to you to be their CEO, to be in charge of the football team. Because of all that, I don’t have sympathy for him going public with, 'I got depressed. I suffered depression early in COVID to the point that I couldn’t even go work out.' Look, he’s the quarterback of America’s team. And you know, and I know this sport you play, it is dog eat dog. It is no compassion, no quarter given on the football field. If you reveal publicly any little weakness, it can affect your team’s ability to believe in you in the toughest spots, and it definitely can encourage others on the other side to come after you.... They’re all looking to you to lead them. And I don’t know. Look, if he said, “I got really depressed and down after the suicide of my brother,” I got you. But he was talking about when the pandemic first hit....For context, see "Fox Sports condemns Skip Bayless’ comments criticizing Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott for speaking about his battle with depression" (Chicago Tribune).
TAPPER: Doesn't he deserve some credit for that? It's better, USMCA is better than NAFTA.Trump gloated like mad in Michigan:
BIDEN: It is better than NAFTA. But look at what the overall trade policy has been, even with NAFTA [sic]? We now have this gigantic deficit in trade with Mexico. Not because NAFTA wasn't made better, because overall trade policy and how he deals with it made everything worse.
TAPPER: I guess my only point is: I'm a blue-collar guy sitting in Macomb County, Michigan, if I were that person.
BIDEN: Yeah.
TAPPER: I'm sitting here listening to your pitch and I'm thinking, "I like what he has to sell but he's part of the establishment that has been selling my jobs down the river. He supported NAFTA, he supported Most Favored Nation status for China and Trump renegotiated NAFTA and Obama and Biden didn't."
BIDEN: I'll tell you what we did do. We inherited the greatest recession short of a depression....
pic.twitter.com/RGnqBeDDjC https://t.co/iRxBXnfCtH
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 9, 2020
John would’ve been 80 today I send you peace and love I still miss you man peace and love to Yoko and Sean.😎✌️🌟❤️☮️ pic.twitter.com/wQzM884pzT
— #RingoStarr (@ringostarrmusic) September 9, 2020
When Mr. Woodward pointed out that both he and Mr. Trump were “white, privileged,” and asked if Mr. Trump could see that they both have to “work our way out of it to understand the anger and the pain, particularly, Black people feel in this country,” Mr. Trump replied, “No,” and added, “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you. Wow. No, I don’t feel that at all.”The NYT characterizes that as a failure to be "reflective."
Maybe "do everything possible to make it required" is clever phrasing and he's really thinking the President lacks the power to order everyone to wear masks or to commandeer local law officials to enforce a mask requirement. So it wouldn't, in fact, be possible....
The idea of a federal requirement to wear masks is so bad, so out of touch with the values of federalism. The conditions vary from place to place, even within states, even within municipalities. It's wrong to have one rule for everyone....
“It’s not the traditional, ‘we need Chris Christie to fill in and play Hillary Clinton’ like we did four years ago,” one of the president’s allies said, referring to the former New Jersey governor who has helped Trump prepare in the past.... Not all of the president’s allies think his casual approach is a wise strategy. Privately, some of them are expressing concern that the president’s overconfidence could backfire.A gaffe moment or stutter! Give me a break. It's not about a moment. It's about sustained debate standing in front of the camera getting pressured for 90 minutes. Biden is unlikely to do well at all, but what's the good of having mock sessions with someone playing Joe Biden and losing track of his statements and saying "look" or "come on" before running out the clock on some random thing that seems related or reminiscing about Scranton? Trump has to decide how merciless he ought to be. That's all. I suspect he'll decide on the spot whether to show compassion or go for the jugular.
In particular, they’re worried that Trump appears to be banking on a Biden misstep in the first 2020 debate; all the three debates are scheduled for 90 minutes each. They said Trump has repeatedly told aides that he’s not worried about debating Biden because the former vice president is likely to have a gaffe moment or stutter. Biden had a severe stutter as a child that he overcame....
In both 2008 and 2012, Biden took an extended stretch of time off the campaign trail to prepare for debates, participating in multiple mock sessions at a makeshift debate set constructed inside a Wilmington, Delaware, hotel. Former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm played the part of Sarah Palin in 2008, and now-Sen. Chris Van Hollen played Paul Ryan in 2012.Who's playing Trump in 2020?
[Compared to debating Bernie Sanders in the primaries] Biden is likely to find it far less difficult to spar with Trump, whom he’s increasingly targeted in more personal and stark terms....Stark differences make it easier?
Scientific American turns to Critical Studies of Science to conclude that we should retire the idea of falsification, upon which the negative half of scientific epistemology rests. The sciences are under serious threat.https://t.co/loEZMiFjdd— James Lindsay, relevant white dude (@ConceptualJames) September 8, 2020
Falsification is appealing because it tells a simple and optimistic story of scientific progress, that by steadily eliminating false theories we can eventually arrive at true ones. As Sherlock Holmes put it, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Such simple but incorrect narratives abound in science folklore and textbooks. Richard Feynman in his book QED, right after “explaining” how the theory of quantum electrodynamics came about, said, "What I have just outlined is what I call a 'physicist’s history of physics,' which is never correct. What I am telling you is a sort of conventionalized myth-story that the physicists tell to their students, and those students tell to their students, and is not necessarily related to the actual historical development which I do not really know!"Well, I can see right there that the article writer is missing something. Feynman wasn't talking about a problem with doing science. He was talking about the problem with doing history!
I honestly don’t understand how this is funny. Is the joke that the interviewer doesn’t like the same things the young woman does? Or that the young woman doesn’t realise the interviewer does not have the same interests as she does and is asking sarcastic questions?
— Andy Young (@andyryoung) September 9, 2020
Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened. Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population....He created a new climate!
Whoa! Okay, I guess it’s back to the Rec room for me. And here i was, thinking i was making progress.
— Mark Leibovich (@MarkLeibovich) September 7, 2020
After her roundtable with Black biz owners in Milwaukee, @KamalaHarris walked out to address ~45 fans standing across the street. “I need your help in Milwaukee, OK? We’re going to get this done. Make sure everybody votes early, right?” @axios pic.twitter.com/NYiZBBseYR
— Alexi McCammond (@alexi) September 7, 2020
I haven't assigned numbers to all of the sunrise types. I want to cover them all and only have 10. I'll figure it out when the year comes full circle on September 9th (my first day of doing the sunrise run).My favorite type has all-over wispy clouds with the sun showing through. Today's sunrise is unusual, with wispy clouds, almost all over, but a bumper of thick clouds at the bottom, right where they completely obscure the sun. I consider this sunrise quite beautiful but rather subtle. It's a sunrise for the sunrise sophisticates.
So far there's 1 & 2 (very cloudy days) and 3 & 4 (very clear days) and 5 (a distinctive Z shape of sunlight). All of the best sunrises are 6-10, but they are harder to classify. I know what 10 -- my favorite -- is, I believe. 6-10 has to do with broken up clouds -- partly cloudy situations that disperse the sunlight.
Biden said of the public’s response to Trump’s law-and-order posturing last week that “they ain't buying it.” And most Democratic political professionals — and some Republicans – believe that’s probably true at the moment. Frank Luntz, the veteran Republican consultant and pollster, said in an email that Trump “is talking about the right issue, but he's talking the wrong way. Suburban voters want ‘public safety’ even more than law and order. They want ‘safe streets’ rather than ‘dominating the streets.’ His rhetoric is over-caffeinated.”People always say Trump is "talking the wrong way." He was talking the wrong way in 2016, and then he won. Talking the wrong way is Trump's super power. The question isn't whether people will say Trump is talking the wrong way, but whether, in the end, they'll vote for him, and they voted for him in 2016 when he talked the wrong way, and I assume they'll do it again. Who cares what's "probably true at the moment"?!
The most effective way to combat racial discrimination is to continually remind white people that they are inhuman demons who are beyond redemption. pic.twitter.com/WclBps4IKz
— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) September 7, 2020
Trump Orders Purge of ‘Critical Race Theory‘ from Federal Agencies https://t.co/ygXcTXRHsQ via @BreitbartNews This is a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue. Please report any sightings so we can quickly extinguish!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 5, 2020
Dr. Fauci continues to be disrespected & marginalized by the administration's lack of commitment to science. My painting offers the message to TRUST FAUCI. We can put our faith in science & truth, not lies, smoke screens & snake oil. #TRUSTFAUCI #TRUTHMATTERS #SCIENCEMATTERS pic.twitter.com/candsYYDPt
— Joan Baez (@joancbaez) September 4, 2020
Graphic: Another angle of the person being set on fire by a Molotov cocktail thrown by antifa militants in SE Portland. Rioters try to help but don’t do much. Cops are the ones who rush in & put out the flames. Video by @BGOnTheScene. #PortlandRiots pic.twitter.com/9gNFo73Lyc
— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) September 6, 2020
What do you think the bubble above Bill Clinton's head says right now? https://t.co/p3efFzKAFK
— Sharyl Attkisson🕵️♂️ (@SharylAttkisson) September 5, 2020