In retaliation for being disinvited by Speaker Nancy Pelosi from delivering his State of the Union speech, Donald Trump cancelled a trip by her and some other congressional leaders to Afghanistan just hours before they were due to depart. These trips to war zones are on military aircraft and kept secret until they are almost over for security reasons.
The flight of an arrow is often used as a metaphor for going straight. Xeni Jardin says that Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame has a new show called Mythbusters, Jr. where he teams up with young people to see how straight an arrow flies. He recruits an expert archer Byron Ferguson who can shoot an apple thrown in the air. Pretty amazing.
How good is master archer Byron Ferguson, who is helping @donttrythis and his #MythBustersJr co-hosts out on tomorrow's Straight as an Arrow myth? Yeah. THIS GOOD. Watch Wednesday at 9p on @ScienceChannel. pic.twitter.com/3HLFVWUDNs
— MythBusters (@MythBusters) January 16, 2019
None of us are wholly good or wholly bad. We all have our good and bad sides. If we are lucky, we are self-aware enough to know that we have bad sides and work to suppress it. But sometimes it escapes our control and reveals itself to others and we receive criticism. What happens next is the decisive thing. We can acknowledge that we did something wrong, apologize, make amends as much as possible, and vow to try and keep our bad side under greater control. Or we can decide that the revelation of our bad side means that we can give ourselves over completely to it and even revel in it.
It seems like Louis C. K. has decided on the second option. After receiving criticism for the things he said in an earlier return to stand up last month, Stacey Solie reports that he seems to have doubled down, to show that this is who he really wants to be.
So be it.
I am going to visit my daughter and son-in-law and so blogging will be light for the next few days. I left for the airport particularly early because I had heard reports of long lines at security checkpoints around the nation but at the Cleveland airport there was no line at all, though the TSA person said there had been a line earlier. All the security people were friendly but that is the usual case in Cleveland.
Members of the Democratic party have realized that there is a lot they can learn from the millennials in their ranks.
The House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee is hosting a session Thursday morning with Ocasio-Cortez of New York (@AOC – 2.42 million followers) and Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut (@jahimes – 76,500 followers) “on the most effective ways to engage constituents on Twitter and the importance of digital storytelling.”
…“The older generation of members and senators is pretty clueless on the social media platforms. It’s pretty clear that a lot of members have 25-year-olds in their offices,” running their social media, Himes said.
“For younger members, they think of social media as every bit of an established form of communication as print or television or radio,” said Josh Hawley, who, at 39, is the youngest U.S. senator.
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I keep learning new stuff about dishwashers. Almost five years ago, I wrote about one misconception of how it worked that got removed when I saw a video taken inside one while it was operating. Now this article tells me that my practice of pre-rinsing before putting items in the dishwasher is not only wasteful of water, it actually leads to less clean dishes!
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Matthew Chapman writes about the weird right wing obsession with Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and how their attempts to discredit her (such as posting a fake photo supposedly of her in a bathtub) are really pathetic and backfiring badly, as she knows how to respond aggressively and they are only serving to increase her profile, way beyond that of any new member of Congress. I think they are so used to Democrats trying to defend and explain themselves from attacks that they are not used to some who responds by gleefully mocking them.
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Nancy Pelosi has written to Donald Trump saying that it would be best to postpone his State of the Union address to the joint session of Congress, scheduled for January 29, until after the government shutdown ends or that he could give it in writing as presidents once used to do. She is effectively withdrawing the invitation for him to speak and since the Speaker is the one who controls the event, she has the right to do so. Trump is realizing that no longer having his obedient puppy Paul Ryan as Speaker has real consequences.
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It is hard to gauge where public sentiment lies on social issues. But one indicator is the commercials that big companies put out. These companies are seeking to maximize their customer base and so anything they do has to have taken into consideration its impact in terms of sales. When they take a stance on hot-button issues, they have likely calculated that the people who will respond favorably to it will be greater than the people who are offended. That Nike’s ad featuring Colin Kaeprnick ended up boosting sales for its product showed that they gauged the zeitgeist correctly even though Donald Trump had been whipping up anti-kneeling sentiment among his base.
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That Theresa May’s deal with the EU was likely to be rejected by parliament today was widely expected. What was perhaps a surprise was the scale of the defeat 432-202. Only 196 of her own Conservative party voted for it, joined by the three Labour MPs and three independents. 118 members of her own party rejected it.
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