White Privilege

In case you don't know what it looks like.

Trump Invites Another Basketball Team to Replace the Warriors.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—One day after rescinding his invitation to the Golden State Warriors, Donald J. Trump invited the entire Russian national basketball team to celebrate with him at the White House.

Trump said that he looked forward to welcoming the Russian team, calling them “much, much better basketball players than those Golden State losers.”

When reporters pointed out that the Russians had won only a bronze in the 2012 Olympics and failed to qualify for the 2016 event, Trump was dismissive, calling the Olympics “rigged.”

It Is to Laugh; NASCAR Ed.

President* Donald Trump tweeted he was proud of NASCAR because no drivers, crew or other team members protested during the national anthem Sunday prior to a race at New Hampshire Motorspeedway.

“So proud of NASCAR and its supporters and fans. They won’t put up with disrespecting our Country or our Flag - they said it loud and clear!” Trump tweeted Monday.

Several team owners and executives had said Sunday they wouldn’t want anyone in their organizations to protest. Richard Childress, who was Dale Earnhardt’s longtime team owner, said of protesting: “It’ll get you a ride on a Greyhound bus.”

Riight. Like people involved in the Whitest Sport in America were going to protest the cops' killing black folk.

There is some delicious irony about the point that people who proudly wave the Flag of Dead Traitors are so, so upset by protesters taking a knee during the playing of the National Anthem. I guess they've forgotten that the last thing that their great-grandfathers would have done would have been to stand for the National Anthem, let alone recite the Pledge.

The larger point is that conservatives are taking a very cheap intellectual out: They're getting outraged at the protests and not bothering to look at what is being protested. But some things never change.

Entire Teams Are Symbolically Taking a Knee

In a sign of solidarity, the Pittsburgh Steelers stayed in the locker room during the national anthem before their 1 p.m. ET kickoff with the Chicago Bears.

Players for the Seattle Seahawks and Tennessee Titans did the same before their game.

An NFL official told ESPN NFL Insider Adam Schefter that no fines are being considered for those players who stayed in the locker room during the anthem.

Football players are not going to be bullied by some old, overweight, short-fingered white guy.

A guy who, mind you, thinks that brain-damage ought to be part of the game, while he has apparently never taken a punch in his life.

Trump says that his call to fire anyone who protests the National Anthem has nothing to do with racism. The hell it doesn't.

By the way, Tom Brady skipped the team visit to the White House in 2015 - President Obama didn't disinvite the team. But when Steph Curry said he wasn't going to go, Trumpelthinskin disinvited his team.

Yep. Nothing to do with race.

In a pig's eye.

Your Sunday Morning Big Prop Noise

Riding around in "FiFi":

In His Heart, Trump Would Love to See This Happen Here

A prominent left-wing Indian journalist critical of Hindu nationalist politics has been shot dead in the south-western Karnataka state, police say.

Gauri Lankesh, 55, was found lying in a pool of blood outside her home in the city of Bangalore. The motive for the crime was not immediately clear.

She was shot in the head and chest by gunmen who arrived by motorcycle.

I believe that Trump would cheer at the murders of reporters who had the temerity to write stories critical of him. If he had is own on-call death squads, like Philippine President Duarte, Trump would have hourly orgasms at being able to order hits on his critics.

Visit Nambia

Trump is fucking fixated on the idea of drug smugglers firing bags of drugs over the border wall into large crowds of Americans who are just milling around there. At first, he was babbling about 60lb bags, now he's blithering about 100lb bags. Other than some anecdotal remarks to a reporter, there's nothing to document 100lb bags of drugs being flung over the border fence. And even if there was wide use of them, a short perusal of videos of modern recreations of catapults (usually trebuchets) can easily fling objects over Trump's envisioned Great Wall of Trump.

Meanwhile, when he is not babbling about catapults or exchanging childish insults with Kim Jong-un, Trump is showing that he has absolutely no dedication to or understanding of the Constitution. He's only in favor of forms of speech when he agrees with it.

Not to mention the optics of standing before a crowd of white Southeners and, in essence, calling for the firing of uppity black folk. Because there's no fascist like an old fascist.

Caturday

Ready for my closeup, CB!

(That's Chip.)

Police: "We've Been Looking for These Two Guys For Quite Some Time."

They were caught after the two criminals broke into a home and the homeowner shot one of them.

Don't you just love stories with happy endings?

(H/T)

If Paul Manafort is a Russian Asset, What Does That Make Mike Pence?

Because Manafort pretty much picked Pence.

It's important that Manafort picked Pence because of whom Manafort may have been working for. Which may also give some insight into the FBI's extraordinary raid on Manafort.

How all this will play out will be anyone's guess. But if it's shown that Manafort was a Russian asset (who paid him while he was working "for free" for Trump, for instance), then everyone who was associated with Manafort, particularly those whom he had a hand in placing in the Trump administration, will be stained.

Pass the popcorn.

CTE

Aaron Hernandez apparently had a bad case of CTE.

That explains a lot about his life and crimes. CTE is nasty.

I've said before that parents who let their kids play contact sports will, sooner or later, find themselves at risk of being accused of child abuse or neglect.

Say you're a late 20s or 30-something parent. Your kid wants to play contact sports. How are you going to feel twenty years later when it's clear that your child has a form of dementia related to playing contact sports? That's, in part, going to be on you. You let your kid play such sports when their brains were still developing and the risk of damage was much higher. And nowadays, you can't even say "I didn't know". The information is out there. You could have known, you should have known.

When it comes to CTE, the NFL is arguably worse than the tobacco industry. The drugs is the tobacco industry's product. Those kids and young men who are at high risk of CTE are he NFL's product. When it comes to making money from suffering, the NFL stands out above almost all others.

Some "Master Negotiator" Trump Is.

Remember, that was one one of his selling points? That he can negotiate "the best deals"?

I don't see any evidence that he can negotiate a single fucking thing on the world stage. All he's really done, so far, is trash-talk like a eleven-year-old bully on a playground. Slinging juvenile insults and making threats? That's not negotiating. The Chinese and the Russians are shaping up to be the only adults in the room on the North Korea issue.

Now, tearing up agreements, that's Classic Trump. His word isn't worth a bucket of warm shit.

Because It's Friday

This locomotive is punching above its weight:

Dear "Breaking911.com": You Suck.

A link in FB took me to a story that "Death Wish Coffee" is being recalled because of, wait for it, it can kill you.

I was reading the story on my phone. The site had an extremely annoying popup ad that could not be cleared. Hitting the X to close it was ineffective and it took me to the advertiser's page, which I didn't notice because, by then, I was mad enough to just close everything out.

So, to the good folks at "breaking911 dahht com" (because no, I'm not giving you putzim a free link): It is only the onset of the High Holy Days that keeps me from wishing that you would be slowly dipped into a pool of molten lava,

Hey, Gents! Come See Australia! See the Wonderful Sights! Enjoy the Fine Beaches!

And get bitten on your dick by a spider.

You might not want to let your "equipment" hang down when taking a dump.

If your wife or girlfriend proposes visiting the Land of Oz, you might have a problem.....

Shorter GOP Senators to the Koch Brothers: "Arf! Arf! Arf! {pant} {pant} Arf! Arf! Arf!"

I'm betting that the reason the GOP has resurrected the ACA repeal is that the Koch Brothers are making good on their threats.

So if you were ever curious about whom the Republicans really work for, you have your answer:

New Student Pilot

B, over at "In the middle of the Right". He's taking lessons.

The primary trainer seems to mostly be a Cessna 150, which, between the 1950s and the 1990s, was the J-3 of the day. Probably more people got their license in 150s (and 152s) than any other aircraft type combined.

5778

I hope that my posts have given you cause to think about different things. But I also hope that I have not given offense to any of you, my Gentle Readers.

If I have, I beg forgiveness. (Not applicable to public figures and politicians. If what I write has offended you, toughen the fuck up or find another line of work.)

May 5778 be a blessing for you and yours.

S&W 929 Review

Pat Kelley's review:

He's obviously a fine shot and he's having fun.

But even if I was in the mood to drop a kilobuck on a range toy, I'd pass based on this review. I'd think that a Performance Center gun would not require one to crank the sights all the way over in order to sight in the gun.

And he's probably right in supposing that the barrel is sized for revolver bullets.

The S&W 929, even with a titanium cylinder, weighs 44oz.

If you do have a gun with a titanium cylinder, remember: Do not use metal bore brushes on the cylinder. Nylon only!

Guess Whose Greasy Fingers Are On the Toys Я Us Bankruptcy?

Bain Capital. It seems that those fuckers were involved in a leveraged buyout of Toys Я Us that loaded the company up with debt.

Bloomberg News thinks that Bain is going to lose a ton of money on this. Right, in a pig's eye.

Shorter Tom Price: "Government Spending Isn't Wasteful When the Money's Spent on Me!"

In a sharp departure from his predecessors, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price last week took private jets on five separate flights for official business, at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars more than commercial travel.

The secretary’s five flights, which were scheduled between Sept. 13 and Sept. 15, took him to a resort in Maine where he participated in a Q&A discussion with a health care industry CEO, and to community health centers in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, according to internal HHS documents.

One of those charter flights was from Dulles to Philadelphia, a route well-served by both the airlines and Amtrak. When you factor in time for security and travel time out to Dulles, Amtrak's probably even quicker.

This is how it is for the Trumpist Grifters: Live large off the Federal purse whilst squeezing down on programs that assist the poor, disabled and the elderly.

The shade of Marie Antoinette is probably looking at this and saying Vraiment?

The Difference Between a Small-Time Crook and a Rich Politician

Your garden-variety small-time crook has to go to the Public Defenders' offices to get a lawyer. If the person charged has some assets, then they get to cash them in to pay for a lawyer.

But hey, if you're a rich politician, you can get other people to pay to defend your sorry ass.

U.S. President* Donald Trump is using money donated to his re-election campaign and the Republican National Committee to pay for his lawyers in the probe of alleged Russian interference in the U.S. election, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Following Reuters exclusive report on Tuesday, CNN reported that the Republican National Committee paid in August more than $230,000 to cover some of Trump’s legal fees related to the probe. ... Trump would be the first U.S. president in the modern campaign finance era to use such funds to cover the costs of responding to a criminal probe, said election law experts.

Pretty nice that the RNC has a "Treason Defense Fund" that Trump can tap into.

zOMG, the "Space Orcs" Are Coming!

That could be the view of another intelligent species regarding humans.

Imagine a world where there is intelligence, but it's plant-based. The plants are like neurons and form up into brains that take up very large areas. Their thought processes could take minutes, hours or days, which is ordinarily not an issue for them, as the brains have an almost infinite lifespan. Drought or wildfires may damage them, but they'd recover. If the world has winters, the brains might go more-or-less dormant in cold weather.

Now an animal-based spacefaring species lands on that world. Can the plant-brains perceive them? Given the mismatch between neural processes, how would they communicate? What would the plant-brains do when they realize that the intruders are not only plucking them, they're (shudder) eating them?

(H/T)

José, You're Drunk. Dissipate and Die, Already

Tropical Storm José is apparently going to bang another U-turn, if not a complete circle, again.

If you're in southern New England or Long Island and you think the storm is passing you by, think again. It's going to come back for another try at you.

So Long to the Whale, UAL Ed.

United Airlines will say so long to its iconic Boeing 747 fleet with a final flight Nov. 7 from San Francisco to Honolulu.
...
The final flight to Honolulu – Flight No. 747 – will recreate the first scheduled United Boeing 747 flight on July 23, 1970, from San Francisco to Honolulu.

The flight will feature a 1970s-inspired menu served by flight attendants in retro uniforms, while the in-flight entertainment will feature content from that era.

Real food in coach, like back in the day when it wasn't routinely awful?

Anyway, don't bother calling for a seat. The flight reportedly sold out in an hour.

Epic Stupidity; Trump Ed.

Trump administration officials, under pressure from the White House to provide a rationale for reducing the number of refugees allowed into the United States next year, rejected a study by the Department of Health and Human Services that found that refugees brought in $63 billion more in government revenues over the past decade than they cost.

I am not surprised one whit. You can bet that whichever goon The Donald put in HHS will have massaged things so it comes out the way that Trump wants.

He'll call the conclusion that he doesn't like "liberal thinking". Sort of like how biologists were denounced in the USSR as "fly-lovers" and how, in another country, particle physics was dismissed as "Jewish science".

Betcha Trump Says Nothing

A magnitude 7.1 earthquake rocked central Mexico on Tuesday, killing at least 44 people as buildings collapsed in plumes of dust and thousands fled into the streets in panic.

The quake came less than two weeks after another quake left 90 dead in the country's south, and it occurred as Mexicans commemorated the anniversary of a 1985 quake that killed thousands.

There won't be a single tweet of sympathy from Trump. His Duty Liar, Sara Whazerface, will not say a single kind word about Mexico from the Spicer Memorial Podium.

Welcome to Trump's Amerika

At least one Jewish congregation in Texas is holding its High Holy Days services in secret.

Hate crimes are up, in part due to a perception that the Trump administration is sympathetic to the nazis.

I know a lot of my co-religionists in this country are liberals, but if they don't know one end of a Glock from the other and how to competently use one, they are deluding themselves.