How long was I gone? What year is it? Are there flying cars now?

I could have sworn I was gone less than a week. How is there this much shit to look back on?


All this stuff happened while I was gone?

GOP Rep. Says Those With Pre-Existing Conditions Don't Live Right

By Karoli Kuns

 “My understanding is that it will allow insurance companies to require people who have higher health care costs to contribute more to the insurance pool,” Brooks said. “That helps offset all these costs, thereby reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives, they’re healthy, they’ve done the things to keep their bodies healthy. And right now those are the people—who’ve done things the right way—that are seeing their costs skyrocketing.”

 Like how dare you expect to pay the same as someone who has been living right when you've been ruining your life with booze and cigarettes or being born with type-I juvenile diabetes or sickle-cell anemia  or MS or whatever. Actually, let me re-phrase that. Mo Brooks is a sick disgusting excuse for a human being and I defy anyone to sink lower than him in the healthcare debate.

Well, be careful what I wish for, I guess!

Sorry Jimmy Kimmel: your sad story doesn't obligate me or anybody else to pay for somebody else's health care.

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) May 2, 2017

Yes, that's right. After TV host Jimmy Kimmel went on the air and talked about his infant son's near-death experience and came up with the radical leftist notion that babies shouldn't be allowed to die just because their parents are poor, that was former Congressman and current deadbeat dad Joe Walsh's response.

Naturally, he got a lot of well-deserved shit for that Tweet and, being completely despicable, vile and utterly devoid of human decency, he of course doubled down.

Health care is complicated. Health care is bankrupting America. But instead of thinking thru all of that, we'd rather cry with @jimmykimmel.

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) May 2, 2017

Because if you really want to appeal to today's modern conservative, going after a man whose newborn son is clinging to life in a hospital is really the way to go. That's not even sarcasm, that's actually good advice if you want to follow the Joe Walsh career path.

I'll say it: For a people no longer capable of logic & reason, it's perfect that a late night comedian just decided our health care policy.

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) May 2, 2017

I like @Elise_Jordan, but nobody is ok with dead babies.

Health care is complicated & it's bankrupting America. https://t.co/zH3c8uNnNX

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) May 3, 2017

Except that you clearly are. You can't say "I ain't gonna pay for that baby to stay alive" and then say "I am not okay with dead babies." You can't get $100,000 behind on child support and have to be sued by your ex-wife and then say "No one is okay with deadbeat dads." You. You are okay with them. You are a deadbeat dad. You are someone who is willing to let babies die rather than have any of your tax dollars help save them. You can't have it both ways you loathsome vermin.


Also while I was gone Cheeto Mussolini tried to talk about American history.  About which he knows next to nothing. To be fair, he did seem to realize that Andrew Jackson was a person who lived and that the Civil War was a thing that happened. Other than that. . .

President Trump Doesn't Seem To Know Why The Civil War Happened

Tom Namako

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Here's the transcript:

Okay, but all the transcripts leave out the best part. He begins by talking about how people are supposedly comparing him to Andrew Jackson without realizing that that is NOT a flattering comparison. It's like on an old episode of American Idol when Simon told a kid "that was abysmal" and the kid answers "oh, thank you very much!" and then Simon has to explain to him "no, that's not a compliment."  Anyway, he's talking about Andrew Jackson when the interviewer mentions that Jackson's wife had died. Trump says "his wife died? His wife died! They destroyed his wife and she died" as if this reporter wasn't the very person who had just told him this literally 2 seconds ago. He turns it around as if this is something he's telling her! It's so shameless!

And then he talks about "no one asks the question 'why was there a Civil War,'" as if this wasn't discussed in every American history class in every high school, middle school and junior high in America. I will promise you, if you walk into any university with a decent history department, there are entire classes offered in the causes of the Civil War. But in his world, he's the only one who has ever pondered this question!

Also, Andrew Jackson was a lot of things, but no one ever accused him of having a "big heart." He was an enslaver, and he was responsible for the "Trail of Tears" because he was pretty much a psychotically racist piece of shit. But a hell of a swashbuckler, I'll give him that! Oh, and also not alive for the Civil War, but you probably knew that already.


Also, at some point in my absence, it became illegal to laugh?

A Code Pink Protester Laughs Over a Trump Nominee and Is Convicted

By CHRISTOPHER MELEMAY 3, 2017

A jury on Wednesday convicted three Code Pink activists on charges related to a protest at the confirmation hearing of Jeff Sessions for attorney general — including a Virginia woman who said all she did was break out in laughter.

Each of the three protesters faces up to 12 months in jail, $2,000 in fines, or both, depending on the outcome of a June 21 sentencing hearing.

For laughing. Okay, there's got to be more to this story, right?

It was early in the hearing when Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama, said that Mr. Sessions’s record of “treating all Americans equally under the law is clear and well-documented,” Ariel Gold, the campaign director of Code Pink, said on Wednesday.

Ms. Fairooz said that, on hearing that, she let out a giggle.

“I just couldn’t hold it,” she said on Wednesday. “It was spontaneous. It was an immediate rejection of what I considered an outright lie or pure ignorance.”

She said when officers came over, she expected to be warned or told to shush and was surprised to be taken into custody.

Well, that's her side of the story. I'm guessing maybe the cops have a different version in which she also committed a crime of some sort, right?

Prosecutors described her actions differently.

Aha! I thought so.

Ms. Fairooz had “let out a loud burst of laughter, followed by a second louder burst of laughter,” the U.S. attorney’s office said in the filing.

Um. . .  but. . . . but it's still just laughing. That can't possibly be illegal. How long was I gone?

The police then tried to “quietly escort” Ms. Fairooz from the room, but she “grew loud and more disruptive, eventually halting the confirmation hearing,” the court papers argued.

Disruptive? If someone disrupts a hearing, aren't they generally just escorted out? What country is this?
So what was she even convicted of? What could possibly have been illegal in her actions?

Ms. Fairooz was found guilty of the two charges she faced: one of disorderly and disruptive conduct and a charge of parading or demonstrating on Capitol grounds, according to her lawyer, Samuel A. Bogash.

 Oh, right. I forgot it's illegal to demonstrate on Capitol grounds without dressing like Paul Revere and holding a misspelt sign.



 Oh, and this story makes me wonder if maybe we haven't gone backwards in time:

President Donald Trump will reportedly be appointing not one but two vocal abortion opponents to the Department of Health and Human Services. 

According to Politico, Teresa Manning — a law professor and anti-choice, anti-contraception activist — will be named deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Population Affairs, which delegates Title X funds to family planning initiatives.

Okay, well that;s no surprise. Of course he's going to appoint anti-choice persons to HHS. But this is where it gets baboon-ass crazy:

 
In a 2003 interview with WBUR Boston, Manning had this to say about contraception in general:

Contraception doesn't work. Its efficacy is very low, especially when you consider over years, which you know a lot of contraception health advocates want — to start women in their adolescent years when they're extremely fertile, incidentally, and continue for 10, 20, 30 years. Over that span of time, the prospect that contraception would always prevent the conception of a child is preposterous.

I can't tell if she actually believes that utter nonsense or if she is just bald-faced lying because she opposes all non-reproductive sex.

I mean, there are studies, right? There have to be. How do you not spend a few minutes in the library, do a Lexis/Nexis search or whatever it's called, and look up a few studies in reputable medical journals?  Instead of just saying "contraception preventing pregnancy? Multiple times? Pfft! Unlikely!"
Oh, right. In our new world, the scientific journals have all been set ablaze in a bonfire on which to burn witches. Or women who understand science. Well, same thing, really!

Well, at least one thing hasn't changed. Major newspapers in America are still doing bs stories where they go find some idiotic Trump voters who (surprise, surprise!) still like Trump! NEWS!

Sunday Review

News Analysis

These Guys Really Like Trump

“When Joe first told me about Trump, I said no, that guy’s a bragger,” Mr. Paslow said. “Then I started listening to him, and I noticed, he’s a billionaire.

Oh for fuck sake. That's the one thing -- the ONE THING-- that everyone knows about Drimpf. Everyone knows that he allegedly is an alleged billionaire. This was something you "noticed" during the campaign? You "noticed" that he's a billionaire? (allegedly) That's the only goddamm thing he ever talks about!

If somebody comes along and says, ‘President Trump, I want to keep my plant in China and I want to close my plant here, here’s $50 million,’ he says, ‘I don’t need your money, mister.’ ”

Okay, first of all, yes he does. He does need the money, because he's (allegedly) not really a billionaire. That's why he licenses his names to cheap con games like Trump University or various shady land development deals. He's not that rich (allegedly). Second, no one needs to bribe the President to keep their factory in China or close their factory here. There are no laws against either of those things. In fact, our recent spate of "free trade" deals seems to encourage that sort of activity.

Mr. Trump came striding into this bleak landscape and offered them hope. He pledged to the crowd that he would bring back the oil and gas industry the very first day he was in office. “Unbelievably, that is exactly what we wanted to hear!” Mr. Paslow said. 

Oh my God! A man running for President came to your town and said exactly what you wanted to hear? Unbelievable! I mean, what are the odds?  What are the odds that a candidate would come into Western Pennsylvania and make vague, unkeepable promises to bring back coal jobs? Serendipity!

And they say journalism is dead!

Your liberal media at work

So the New York Times, America's "Paper of Record" has hired a new columnist. Presumably, they had their pick. The Times Op-Ed page is still probably the most prestigious in America, so there would be no excuse for hiring some stupid right-wing twit in the mold of say, Ross Douthat or someone, right?
Right?

Climate of Complete Certainty

Bret Stephens APRIL 28, 2017 

 This is Bret Stephens’s first column.

When someone is honestly 55 percent right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60 percent right, it’s wonderful, it’s great luck, and let him thank God.
But what’s to be said about 75 percent right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100 percent right? Whoever says he’s 100 percent right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.
— An old Jew of Galicia

 Who is this "old Jew?" As far as I can tell, he is someone made up by Polish author Czeslaw Milosz for his 1953 book The Captive Mind. Why he is being quoted as some sort of expert when he doesn't seem to have ever existed is a bit puzzling, but whatever.

In the final stretch of last year’s presidential race, Hillary Clinton and her team thought they were, if not 100 percent right, then very close.

Right on the merits. Confident in their methods. Sure of their chances. When Bill Clinton suggested to his wife’s advisers that, considering Brexit, they might be underestimating the strength of the populist tide, the campaign manager, Robby Mook, had a bulletproof answer: The data run counter to your anecdotes.

That detail comes from “Shattered,” Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s compulsively readable account of Clinton’s 2016 train wreck. Mook belonged to a new breed of political technologists with little time for retail campaigning and limitless faith in the power of models and algorithms to minimize uncertainty and all but predict the future.

Okay, so you spend the first half of your column quoting,  paraphrasing, and summarizing other people's writings. The Times must be bursting with pride already.

There’s a lesson here. We live in a world in which data convey authority. But authority has a way of descending to certitude, and certitude begets hubris. From Robert McNamara to Lehman Brothers to Stronger Together, cautionary tales abound.

 Well, I'm not the expert here, but I don't think Robert MacNamara was really relying on data. Seems to me he was ignoring the inconvenient data like body counts in order to push the false narrative that the Vietnam War was going well. And Lehman Brothers didn't give a shit about any datum other than how much money they could rake in before the house of cards collapsed and they would be bailed out by the taxpayers.

 We ought to know this by now, but we don’t. Instead, we respond to the inherent uncertainties of data by adding more data without revisiting our assumptions, creating an impression of certainty that can be lulling, misleading and often dangerous. Ask Clinton.

Are data inherently uncertain? Maybe it depends on what type of data. Public opinion polling is certainly fallible. I mean, there's no way that every potential voter can be surveyed, and no way to know how many voters might change their minds between the survey date and election day. So that type of data could be considered "inherently uncertain." I mean, it's not like, say, climate measurements, where the temperature can be precisely measured and compared to previous temperatures. Not much uncertainty there. But if you're talking about the Clinton team's use of computer models and algorithms, then yes. I'm with you so far.

 With me so far? Good. Let’s turn to climate change.

 


 

Last October, the Pew Research Center published a survey on the politics of climate change. Among its findings: Just 36 percent of Americans care “a great deal” about the subject. Despite 30 years of efforts by scientists, politicians and activists to raise the alarm, nearly two-thirds of Americans are either indifferent to or only somewhat bothered by the prospect of planetary calamity.

Why? The science is settled. The threat is clear. Isn’t this one instance, at least, where 100 percent of the truth resides on one side of the argument?

 

 Yes. Yes it is. The science is settled, the threat is clear. The fact that a minority of Americans surveyed (inherently uncertain data) choose to take this seriously does not alter the facts.

 Well, not entirely. As Andrew Revkin wrote last year about his storied career as an environmental reporter at The Times, “I saw a widening gap between what scientists had been learning about global warming and what advocates were claiming as they pushed ever harder to pass climate legislation.” The science was generally scrupulous. The boosters who claimed its authority weren’t.

 That does not change the fact that the science is settled. The science was scrupulous. (Can a field of study be scrupulous? That seems wrong to this English teacher's son, but let's not nitpick.)

 Anyone who has read the 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change knows that, while the modest (0.85 degrees Celsius, or about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the Northern Hemisphere since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities.

Okay, first of all, just because those numbers sound "modest" to a layman's ears doesn't mean they aren't significant. If your body temperature went up a mere 1.5 degrees, you would probably think that was a big deal. 

 And, yeah, "probabilities." Like there is a pretty high probability that as the polar ice caps melt, the laws of physics probably won't change to keep sea levels from rising to dangerous levels. And there's a "probability" that rising sea levels have something to do with the streets of Miami being flooded at high tide most days. 

 That’s especially true of the sophisticated but fallible models and simulations by which scientists attempt to peer into the climate future. To say this isn’t to deny science. It’s to acknowledge it honestly.

 Okay. Of course models and simulations are uncertain predictors of the future. But we don't really need a lot of simulations to predict the goddamm present. The present in which each year is a new record for warmest year on record, breaking the record held by the previous year. The present in which polar ice is disappearing at an alarming rate. The present in which sea acidity is rising and coral reefs are dying out. You can see all those things happening today, right now, with no computer models or formulae or algorithms, just a functioning pair of eyes.

 None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences. But ordinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism. They know — as all environmentalists should — that history is littered with the human wreckage of scientific errors married to political power.

 Sure. "ordinary citizens" have every right to be skeptical. Just as they have every right to believe that the world is flat, the moon landing was fake, professional wrestling is real and trickle-down economics work. And the leaders of society have an obligation to ignore those skeptics and enact sane policies. Policies that take science into account. That's why we have scientists and that's why we have governments. So that people who think that spacemen built the pyramids or that Joseph built them to store grain can be ignored while the grownups solve real-world problems. 

I’ve taken the epigraph for this column from the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who knew something about the evils of certitude. Perhaps if there had been less certitude and more second-guessing in Clinton’s campaign, she’d be president. Perhaps if there were less certitude about our climate future, more Americans would be interested in having a reasoned conversation about it.

 So, if climatologists were to end each report with "eh, but what do I know?" you think then we could have a civilized discussion about the actual thing that is actually happening right fucking now that is going to kill countless people with floods, famines and disease? Is that what you think?

 Well, that's it for the next few days. The NRA is holding some sick convention in Atlanta and have invited Il Douche to speak, so we gotta get out of town. We'll be back as soon as the coast is clear.