Now comes another strange incident out of Seabeck, Washington, where California-based photographer Phoo Chan captured a sequence of photos showing a crow alight on the back of an eagle in midair.
According to a biologist who specializes in crow behavior, the bird was
likely in the middle of a territorial attack when it landed briefly on
the eagle's back, National Geographic
reports. Even the presence of a larger bird provokes a defensive
reaction. In this case, the crow got closer than smaller birds typically
do and settled in for the ride.
It appears that the prize winning author and academic offered some very trenchant thoughts regarding the trillion dollar payout that Elon Musk has recently awarded himself:
So curious that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates— scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads); pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team; references to history. In fact he seems totally uneducated , uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the “most wealthy person in the world.”
During the exchanges that followed, another participant wondered why, "Wherever he goes, he wants to leave." Oates replied with the following:
"Wherever he goes, he wants to leave"-- That's because when he gets there, he has brought his own self along; and whatever club he's invited to join has been devalued by the invitation.
2 things to note:
I am not profoundly embarrassed that I have never read any Oates. Given her prodigious output, is there anything that my reader(s) would suggest that I read? Preferably a short story or a novella, I don't think that I am ready to dive into the deep end. (My taste in literature tends toward the pulp)
Part of me thinks, "Do not offend this woman," it could be as bad as making an enemy of a murder of crows. Another part of me thinks, "If I were the recipient of such a righteous burn, I would be participating in a work of art of the highest order.
Representative Katie Porter, (D-CA) does her homework, and she knows her numbers, and when she whips out her white board, someone is in for a can of whup ass.
In this case, it was the Richard Gonzalez, the CEO of AbbVie, which is gouging patients for its Humira Arthritis drug.
She showed that the money for R&D is dwarfed by advertising, and executive compensation, particularly that compensation which is driven by stock buybacks:
Or, as Porter observed: "You lie to patients when you charge them twice as much for an unimproved drug, when you tell us that R&D justifies those price increases. The Big Pharma fairy tale is one of groundbreaking R&D that justifies astronomical prices. But the pharma reality is that you spend most of that money making money for yourself and your shareholders."
Roll the tape, it's beautiful: (It's also not that difficult if you aren't spending 8 hours a day dialing for dollars for your DCCC dues)
It appears that the Mayor of Danbury, Connecticut is VERY angry about a recent bit that John Oliver did on juries.
Specifically, he's angry that John Oliver had the throw-away line, "F%$# Danbury," when he was discussing disparities in jury selections, and highlighted specific circumstances in Hartford and New Britain, Connecticut where the residents of those cities (about ⅔ of the minority population in those judicial districts) were excluded.
Picking a fight with John Oliver is like wrestling with a pig, you both get dirty, and the pig loves:
Officials in Danbury, Connecticut, say they will name their sewage plant after the comedian John Oliver, in retaliation for an expletive-filled rant about the city on his HBO show.
Mayor Mark Boughton announced the move on his Facebook page.
“We are going to rename it the John Oliver Memorial Sewer Plant,” the Republican mayor said. “Why? Because it’s full of crap just like you, John.”
“If you’re going to forget a town in Connecticut,” he said, “why not forget Danbury? Because, and this is true, f%$# Danbury!”
Noting Danbury’s “charming railway museum” and its “historic Hearthstone Castle”, he said: “Danbury, Connecticut can eat my whole ass.”
Oliver added that he knew “exactly three things about Danbury. USA Today ranked it the second-best city to live in 2015, it was once the center of the American hat industry and if you’re from there, you have a standing invite to come get a thrashing from John Oliver, children included, f%$# you.”
(%$# Mine)
I know very little about Danbury. I've never been there, even when I was living in Connecticut, though I might have driven through it on the way to New York City, but I do know this: Don't pick a fight with John Oliver.
Also, unlike Reed, Andrea Long Chu actually gets into the weeds of the book, and not how Soloway looks, or dresses, etc., which to my mind puts her a pretty big step above Reed.
She demolishes the recollections of a narcissistic asshole on their own terms:
As a lightweight behind-the-scenes look at a critically acclaimed television series, Jill Soloway’s new memoir She Wants It: Desire, Power, and Toppling the Patriarchy is just south of worth purchasing at the airport. As a book about desire, power, or toppling the patriarchy, it is incompetent, defensive, and astonishingly clueless. This is a story about someone who responds to criticisms of her TV show by taking “a glamping writers’ retreat” to El Capitan: “We had a shaman come. She did magic incantations as we lay on the floor of a yurt.” It is an unwitting portrait of a rich Los Angeles creative type with a child’s knack for exploiting the sympathies of others, a person whose deep fear of doing the wrong thing was regularly outmatched by an even deeper distaste for doing the right thing. The nicest thing that can be said of this oblivious, self-absorbed, unimportant book is that it proves, once and for all, that trans people are fully, regrettably human.
John Oliver was covering the coal industry, and its rather silly PR efforts on his show, and a famously litigious coal company CEO sent a cease and desist to prevent the show from mocking him. Much hilarity ensues:
This past weekend on John Oliver's Last Week Tonight, he took on the issue of "coal" and some politicians' obsession with coal jobs as the only true "American" jobs. The whole segment is interesting, but obviously not the kind of thing we'd normally write up. What we do frequently write about, however, is censorious threats, often from wealthy execs, designed to try to silence people from commenting on issues regarding those doing the threatening. And, it appears that's exactly what happened with coal exec Bob Murray, the CEO of Murray Energy, when he found out that John Oliver was doing a segment that included some bits about Murray. I recommend watching the whole thing, but the parts about Murray include a brief bit around 4:45 in the video and then a much longer section starting around 12:30 in the video, where Oliver notes:
I'm going to need to be careful here, because when we contacted Murray Energy for this piece, they sent us a letter instructing us to "cease and desist from any effort to defame, harass, or otherwise injure Mr. Murray or Murray Energy" and telling us that "failure to do so will result in immediate litigation..."
This is like waving a red flag in front of a bull, and John Oliver decides to put the spurs to Mr. Murray.
He goes full talking squirrel (just watch the video) on Robert Murray's flabby white ass:
Last night Trevor Noah had right wing conservative Tomi Lahren.
It was a very polite conversation, and since Lahren is basically a blond shapley Rush Limbaugh without the charm, I got frustrated with the genial tenor, and watched Alton Brown macerate squashes or suchlike.
Today, I read glowing reviews of how thoroughly he destroyed her.
He really did. It kind of sneaks up on you, it's like watching Raymond Burr as Perry Mason, setting the witness at ease before making them confess to murder.
The Senate Banking Committee conducted a hearing Tuesday about the massive scandal currently engulfing Wells Fargo. The word "fraud" was used repeatedly by senators on both sides of the aisle when describing the bank's creation of millions of unauthorized bank and credit card accounts for existing customers. ……… Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren—a longtime advocate for more stringent regulation of Wall Street—tore into Stumpf, describing the unauthorized accounts as a "massive, years long scam." She asked Stumpf what he has done to take responsibility for his bank's actions. "You have said repeatedly, 'I am accountable,'" she said. "But what have you done to actually hold yourself accountable? Have you resigned?" Stumpf avoided answering the question directly, prompting Warren to repeat her question, her voice rising, at least three times. Warren proceeded to pummel Stumpf with more questions. "Have you returned one nickel of the money you earned while this scam was going on?" she asked. Stumpf evaded the question several times. (Stumpf said earlier in the hearing that he earned $19.3 million last year.) Finally, an exasperated Warren said, "I'll take that as a 'no.'" She then asked if he'd fired any members of his senior management. Stumpf initially began by describing the firing of regional branch managers, but Warren stopped him, emphasizing that her question was not about low-level leadership but about the people at the top. Again, Stumpf's answer was no.
She then went on to note that Stumpf had earned an additional $200 million in stock options from the stock appreciation largely driven by their absurdly high cross-selling numbers.
She really took the bark off that asshole, and it is a true thing of beauty.
Case in point, his latest skewering of police whingeing about the fact that they might be recorded when the break the law and violate the constitution:
The police are just trying to make a basic point: People are treating them unfairly just because of who they are and how they look. People keep following them around with cameras, watching everything they do, suspicious that they're always about to break the law, leaving police afraid to even get out of their cars for fear that someone might whip out a phone and brutally film them. Who can imagine how that must feel? And if you listen carefully, all the police are saying is "phones down, don't shoot."
It is a brutal take-down of police complaints about the fact that law enforcement agents might now be held accountable for breaking the law.
What people like New York Police Union president Patrick Lynch and FBI director James Comey are suggesting is that we must structure our society so that police are able to operate with impunity, and without accountability, all while operating in secrecy.
This is quite literally the definition of a police state.
On The Daily Show this evening, Trevor Noah has an AMAZING opening monologue.
Not to spoil it too much, but he argued that Donald Trump was quite presidential, only the presidency in question was an African one, like Muammar Qaddafi, Idi Amin, and Robert Mugabe.
Ahmed Mohamed’s homemade alarm clock got him suspended from his suburban Dallas high school and detained and handcuffed by police officers on Monday after school officials accused him of making a fake bomb. By Wednesday, it had brought him an invitation to the White House, support from Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mark Zuckerberg, and a moment of head-spinning attention as questions arose whether he had been targeted because of his name and his religion. As a result, a 14-year-old freshman at MacArthur High School in Irving, Tex., who is partial to tinkering, technology and NASA T-shirts and wants to go to M.I.T., found himself in a social media whirlwind that reflected the nation’s charged debates on Islam, immigration and ethnicity. “Cool clock, Ahmed,” President Obama said on Twitter. “Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.” Mr. Obama’s staff invited Ahmed to the White House for Astronomy Night on Oct. 19, an event bringing together scientists, engineers, astronauts, teachers and students to spend a night stargazing from the South Lawn. The president’s spokesman said the episode was a case study in unreasoned prejudice in an era when the country is fighting Islamic terrorism at home and in the Middle East. “This episode is a good illustration of how pernicious stereotypes can prevent even good-hearted people who have dedicated their lives to educating young people from doing the good work that they set out to do,” said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary.
These are not good-hearted people, and Irving is not a good-hearted place.
Their mayor, Beth Van Duyne, has successfully run on a platform of religious bigotry for years now, and I do not expect anything resembling an apology from her.
Of course, now it's blown up into a major sh%$ storm with POTUS got into the game on Twitter:
Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It's what makes America great.
This blog is a place to put my stream of consciousness thoughts about life, politics, technology, and cats.
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I find that if I wait until year's end I miss stuff from earlier in the year.
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In case you are wondering, this is not a crow taking a ride on a Bald Eagle, it is a crow going Medieval on a Bald Eagle that got too close to its nest.
