Weiner’s weiner strikes again

Yes, I know it’s not fair, democrats don’t run around being all high and mighty decreeing who can put their divine what in a gutter sinner’s where. Nevertheless, I said this with Clinton and I’ll say it with Anthony Wiener, please, fucking stop. If Clinton had been able to keep little willie in his pants, Gore might well have prevailed in 2000. [Read more…]

Generational economic mobility in easy to read map form

blog_social_mobility_regional

I’m not going to be the first one to say this — you’d have to be blind not to notice it. Dixie is damn near a third-world hell-hole within our borders. We can argue about which fucked up idea caused most of it, and it’s seems fair to infer no one policy could fail quite this spectacularly, but there is no denying the anti-economic correlation between the know-nothing fundamentalist-ruled neo-confederate non-unionized racist deep south and the rest of the nation.

GOP head assures fundamentalists his party not serious about being tolerant

The Republican Party has a terrible problem, too many people think they’re a bunch of old creepy white guys who only care about a few creepy old, rich religious fanatics! Some conservatives have even been running around saying they might be more inclusive to immigrants or gays and lesbians, perish the though! So party chairman Reince Priebus took to the fundie airwaves to quietly assure the right-wing faithful that his party will not waver from a course of religiously inspired hatred and intolerance, but they will rename hatred love and intolerance they’ll call grace: [Read more…]

An economic experiment

It’s no secret around these parts that I’m looking for a real-life job with better pay and more advancement opportunity. I just saw exactly such a job with a great company, the physical site is very close by — I could almost walk to it. The qualifications include familiarity with online commerce, strong customer service experience, ability to navigate the Internet, clear and concise verbal and written skills, and the ability to keep cool under pressure. A background in online community management, sales and analytics was listed as a plus. [Read more…]

A message in the mud

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Our local lake is still — barely — capable of supporting wakeboard boats, something I tested out yesterday in the photo above. It won’t be much longer, Lake Travis will simply dry up into Baked Mud Canyon if we don’t get a veritable deluge of rain in the next few months. But if present trends continue there could be plenty of water. Scientists working with Antarctic sediments have found a disturbing signal: the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, the largest ice sheet on earth today, melted partly or wholly during the Pliocene. And that pushed global sea levels up almost 200 feet (65 m), the only thing between us and the kind of rise is time, the GHG concentrations are about the same [Read more…]

Tale of Caution

As long as we’re talking about relationships, one of the things I look for these days, right off the bat in any prospective relationship, plutonic or otherwise, is a pattern of evasiveness. Can that woman answer a simple question, like ‘do you want to go out this weekend?’ Most girls can answer that, they may say no and make themselves unavailable, but they can answer it. The evasive person will never quite say yes and never quite say no, and this pattern will persist. They’ll answer with “Maybe, I’ll let you know” and then they never let you know and repeat this same speil over and over. [Read more…]

Say “Cheese” to Cassini

PaleBlueBlot

“From its perch in the Saturn system, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft took pictures of Earth from nearly 900 million miles (nearly 1.5 billion kilometers) today. To celebrate the first time the public has had advance notice that Earth’s portrait was being taken from interplanetary distances, scientists and engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and other Earthlings elsewhere gathered to wave at Saturn on July 19. Cassini took pictures of Earth between 2:27 and 2:42 p.m. PDT today.”