There was this provocative tweet from the daughter-in-law, which had many problems. (See the comments.) One of the biggest is that it wasn't Dad's map, it was Dubya's from 2004. But most of the argumentative responses take a form like this one (which I kind of admire for sarcastic condescension)... Affirming that in a purely arithmetic calculation of national political preference, Democrats are more numerous.

Which is true. But that only matters in elections, and as we have seen, sometimes not even then.

Listen, these people want to go back in time and win 2016. That's all they think about. They're deluded, like guys who can't stop calling a girlfriend who cut them loose... They want to keep arguing with her until she admits that it really had been best to stay in the downtown hipster townhouse instead of moving to the suburbs and make babies the way she'd wanted to seven years earlier. ('But Honey, I can show you THE MATH...!')

Trump's election is the biggest challenge to entrenched political machinery in our lifetimes. I'm not sure there's been a more portentous change in national leadership in our history. (Coney probably knows.)

No Democrat has ever spoken a word to encourage humble consideration of their fate. Their only response has been hatred for the man himself, in the same way that pro-life types obsess pornographically about abortion doctors rather than the incessant stream of women who so eagerly pay his rates.

So Lara's commenters (and the entire Democratic machine) dream of a single-warrior death match where electoral victory is the only goal. A 'buy-in' by the larger electorate is not a consideration. Dems want to take their 51% and never again consider the interests or purposes of the 49%, whom they'll imagine to be vanquished.

But Velcomb tdo Amerdeek-ah!… With or without electoral representation in DC, those voters won't go away.

You'll have noticed that Trump hasn't accomplished anything in terms of policy… certainly nothing of the magnitude of his actual elevation to Chief Executive. Building walls and rebuilding our immigration policy come to mind... He hasn't diminished the size or cancerous expansion of government and regulation, budgets are still fattening, and the gutting of TPP doesn't seem to have diminished our blossoming global confrontations.

And Texas is dropping something like 675 Republican Congressmen, and it's easy to imagine that even if Trump is re-elected, he'll be essentially powerless.

Whatever revolutionary power the man carried is being squandered... Basically, because he spends his time writing tweets for which his dearest fanboys can masturbate every morning before going to work. The man himself sees no dawn beyond tomorrow. He lives for today, and will solve tomorrows challenges (to himself, if to no one else) in the 8th-grade style that's carried him through a tawdry lifetime. The office, its powers and its consequences, are galactically larger than the man.


It would be great if there were some figure in public life, inside politics or out, who was admirably and vocally attuned to all this.

Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner comes closest and gave me some of it, but his audience is constrained to principled and literate conservatives, a quickly diminishing club.

See @TPCarney 's tweets from this morning, 1 October 2019. He's a sharp fellow.

And now, amusing tweets-

Giraffe.

Movie marquee.

Useful tattoos.

If we never again encountered the "wait for it" trope, it would be fifty years too late.

Neat Tweet:

Seems obvious to me that transsexuals do what they do because biological sex is supremely important to them[.]

Apologies— The neat tweet.

Oh no, William & Mary won't do.

Oh no, William & Mary won't do.

I didn't make mention of that story because a) my 72 hour rule, and b) I thought it a fake. That said, the girl's (grand?)parents gave a thoughtful and honest apology, not a "we're sorry you're offended".

She should be booted from the school, as I'm sure that would have been one punishments handed down had the accusations be true.

Are you SURE a 60% success rate is a good result?

Oh, positive!

Bloody good, I'd say.

Napoleon Chagnon obit in the NYTimes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/science/napoleon-chagnon-dead.html?searchResultPosition=1

If you listen to the data, you may find stories you didn't expect to find.

News you can, ummm, use?

A rectal surgeon said you're probably wiping your butt wrong

https://www.insider.com/how-to-wipe-your-butt-the-healthy-way-prevent-tearing-2019-8

It's October 1st, so I'm here to remind you all to share this picture when the moment after you cite a source, an idiot budges in and tries to discredit it because said source isn't aligned with the idiot's political/religious/ideological dogma:

https://i.imgur.com/eAoD8yU.jpg

When you abuse the process so badly that the courts decide you no longer have qualified immunity:

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/at-u-of-iowa-university-officials-held-personally-liable-for-discrimination-against-christian-s/

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/woke-math-in-seattle/

Enjoy the sanity.

https://spectator.us/listen-children-climate-change/

YES! I am taking good care of my butt! I feel vindicated by my bidet use.

Shana Tovah Goddess! A good, sweet new year!

Crid, in your first post I am surprised to find you reach the same answers I have, although I am not surprised you've said it better.
• I don't have Twitter
• News is reporting both Japanese and Chinese negotiations to the good.

Reminder: I'm not, "deplorable", and I refuse not only the assertion but the company of those who think so - and it remains a despicable thing for a Presidential aspirant to say.

How to make a politician -left, right, and centre- supermoist because they know the laws are for the little people:

https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/1178429549689921536

Scroll towards Miss-ter South Africa and read the angry comments.

And Mister Sweden looks exactly like I imagined

https://www.boredpanda.com/mister-global-2019-national-costume/

On the badge thing, large corporate management loves that stuff. And then they find out it is a complete waste of money. Your managers already know who is and who is not productive. Taking 10 more minutes in the can or catting to someone doesn't really make a difference. And always the people most likely to steal are the janitors and the security guards.

When Galloway has an erection, he's a lot of fun.

" read the angry comments."

Nah. I'm good.

> Reminder:

Hillary lives in your head, rent-free.

...For which a shitty real-estate investor exploits you like nobody's business.

Trump would help things out a great deal -- since manufacturing shrank 1.3% in the 3rd quarter of 2019 - by repealing the universal tariffs on steel and aluminum (currently 25% and 10%, respectively). Unlike the ones he is imposing on Red China, these tariffs are truly unnecessary. Downstream manufacturers in the USA would thank him greatly.

In the meantime, a hundred bad days make a hundred good stories.

From Slate.

It's horrible enough that such "parents" are not that rare (anyone who works in a restaurant with servers will tell you that), but to think they'd keep demanding sympathy from online strangers, over and over...but at least they're not getting any!

Btw, the headline is misleading. Clearly, the parent has little or no doubt the WAITRESS was in the wrong. (As one of the commentators pointed out, she was almost certainly just doing what her boss had told her to do, since talking directly to the parents likely wouldn't have helped. Not to mention that if she had tripped over the kid and spilled hot soup on him, how much would you bet that the parents would have sued?)

https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/09/kids-running-around-restaurants-care-and-feeding.html

"My wife and I and our 4-year-old son were out to dinner last week. It was a medium-nice restaurant, not fast food, but not super fancy either. My son is a normal, active little boy, and it’s hard for him to sit through a whole dinner, so we let him explore the restaurant a little. I noticed our waitress giving him the hairy eyeball, so we asked him to stop running. He was pretty good about it after that, but he did get underfoot when she was carrying a tray, and she spoke to him pretty sharply to go back to our table and sit down. I felt it was completely uncalled for, and she should have come and spoken to us personally instead of disciplining someone else’s child.

"I tipped 5 percent and spoke briefly to her manager, who gave noncommittal replies. My wife agrees with me, but when we posted about it on Facebook, we got a lot of judgy responses."

Enjoy the scolding from the columnist.

Oh, and someone else pointed out that the likely reason the manager didn't have harsher words for the parents was that he/she was trying to prevent them from posting any nasty, exaggerated stories on Yelp.

Raddy:

News is reporting both Japanese and Chinese negotiations to the good.

NKorea fires unidentified projectiles toward Japan

> Reminder: I'm not, "deplorable",

1. We'll be the judge of that.

2. The renegade comma nourishes our doubt.

That's the best thing we've seen in Slate since Kaus and Kinsley left.

Agreed on the undisciplined parents Lenona. "explore the restaurant a little" is not acceptable behavior.

That said I wonder how much life Yelp and similar companies have left in them. At one point Yelp was fairly accurate. But for at least the last five years I haven't found it reliable at all. One restaurant I regularly go to which serves good food has terrible reviews. I went to another place because I was in a part of town I didn't know and it had 4/5 stars. The food was rancid. And that isn't an exaggeration. The vegetables had mold on them and the meat was literally rancid. I should have called the public health inspectors on them.

Yelp's roughly 5% profit margin isn't anything special. Then again I don't know of an alternative that is accurate much less more profitable. Perhaps such is life.

Child abuse by sex ed activists in Arizona:

Parents Fight Back: Sex and Kindergarten in America

I am woman, see me torch, in locations too many to ignore . . .

WATCH: Pro-abortion radical feminists set fire to Mexico City’s Catholic cathedral

Add

"A rectal surgeon said you're probably wiping your butt wrong"

to

"When you abuse the process so badly that the courts decide you no longer have qualified immunity"

and you'll probably have a hit screenplay on your hands. Wash thoroughly.

An article called "A rectal surgeon said you're probably wiping your butt wrong" from a website called The Insider? And it's *not* salacious?

This is a very weird time.

"Raddy:

News is reporting both Japanese and Chinese negotiations to the good.

Drudge:

NKorea fires unidentified projectiles toward Japan"

Both things could be true. If the Trump strategy is going to succeed, it's probably going to do so by creating a fracture in the NK leadership. The biggest danger there is: We tend to think of nuke-armed nations as having the suitcase with the red button in it always in possession of the nation's head honcho. However, people in the know seriously doubt that the Nork's systems have that many safeguards. It's entirely possible that a lieutenant at a launch site somewhere could make a decision on their own to launch. And if leadership starts breaking down, said lieutenant might view it as an opportunity for career advancement.

Frankly, I don't see this problem being solved without an invasion. Of course, getting China out of the way would be a necessary pre-condition. They don't have to support such an invasion; all they have to do is agree to be neutral. Of course, such negotiations will be very dicey, which is one of the reasons we aren't overtly supporting the Hong Kong independence movement.

If there's an invasion, it will be by the Chinese. But the Norks probably have as many missiles pointing toward Beijing as toward Tokyo or the US.

In the best imaginable scenario, a gentle collapse of the NK government would send millions of malnourished, under-grown, under-educated, under-disciplined, under-socialized people streaming into the country, which has problems enough with ethnic minorities as it is. Did I mention that many of these refugees would be speed freaks?

By any calculation, NK is a threat and a burden to the Chinese; there's no conceivable posture of 'neutrality.' Any warfare from or towards Pyongyang would redound immediately to China.

Japan. China. Hey, mention North Korea instead!

The idea that so many would consider Hillary good company should worry any thinker.

Reasoning Deficit Disorder abounds.

"Reporting to the good" (sic) is not my standard of performance for executive policy towards Asia. Trashing TPP, the best imaginable constraint on idiot trade behavior from Asia, is not my standard for executive policy towards Asia.

Tell us again about the cell phone.