Wednesday Night

Tomorrow is Monday.

Sorry For All Of My Bad Words About Golf

I'm sure it is lots of fun. I just spent a summer temping in a father/son office where, when not yelling at their administrator (their 50-year-old "girl"), they did nothing but talk about golf.

Nevertheless, the Erie County District Court in Buffalo, N.Y., has vacated the murder conviction of Valentino Dixon, 48, who was serving a 39-years-to-life sentence—the bulk of it in the infamous Attica Correctional Facility—for the 1991 killing of Torriano Jackson. On that hot August night long ago, both were at a loud street party with underage drinking when a fistfight over a girl turned to gunfire.

But before we dive into what really happened, a quick refresher on why golfers might care extra about Valentino Dixon. Six years ago, Golf Digest profiled this inmate who grinds colored pencils to their nubs drawing meticulously detailed golf-scapes. Although Dixon has never hit a ball or even stepped foot on a course, the game hooked him when a golfing warden brought in a photograph of Augusta National’s 12th hole for the inmate to render as a favor. In the din and darkness of his stone cell, the placid composition of grass, sky, water and trees spoke to Dixon. And the endless permutations of bunkers and contours gave him a subject he could play with.

More Thread

One of those "spend 2 hours on the phone with the cable company" kinda days. You decide if that's literally or figuratively!

Wednesday Crass Commercialism

My friend wrote a book! Well more of a friend of many friends, but close enough. Boomer1





Reviews are never wrong!

Boomer1 by Daniel Torday, coming out Sept. 18, is a brilliant novel about a new lost generation.

Mark Brumfeld and Cassie Black are overeducated Brooklyn bluegrass musicians with no jobs and no real skills, navigating the ever-extending transition to adulthood.

Mark fails to parlay a Ph.D. into a professorship, ends up back in his parents’ basement, and blames the entire generation of baby boomers hording all the desired careers. Using the handle “boomer1,” Mark starts posting videos threatening retaliation against the boomers that won’t retire.

Lunch Thread

enjoy

Area Reporters Report Their Prime Sources Don't Know Anything, Miss This Big Scoop

Title is slight exaggeration, but Marcy gets this right.

In an article about how Trump’s lawyers, generally, are clueless, and demonstrating though not reporting that the lawyers providing information to the press are part of that general cluelessness, Maggie and Mike don’t pause to reflect on whether that leaves them, too, clueless.

So when Trump tries to understand his plight by reading Maggie and Mike, he would believe a fiction largely created by the lies he has already told his lawyers and his preference for PR rather than solid legal advice.

Roughly, Trump's lawyers don't really know anything, but they (the real lawyers and especially the teevee ones) talk to the press a lot to spin the investigation. Trump gets his information about it from these press reports, especially the conservative propaganda channel version of those reports, and this further reinforces the bullshit loop.

The Meek Shall Inherit The Earth

Rich space nerds have this fantasy that the Earth is going to be turned into a smoldering fireball, or an unlivable post-climate change dystopian hellscape, and, well, there's just nothing we can do about that so we'd better figure out how to send 8 smart unappreciated rich guys and A LOT of hot breeding age women and some robot babysitters to do the hard work to, say, Mars, where they will solve the simple problem of interplanetary colonization and terraforming and begin the new utopian future dedicated to freedom and rule by rich nerds. To save humanity!

Probably a bit easier to clean things up a bit here at home, I imagine, but what do I know.

Wednesday Morning Thread

Tuesday Night

Tomorrow is Friday.

As I Have Been Trying To Tell You

George W. Bush is bad. I did point it out a couple of times somewhere in the archive of this dumb blog.

Exclusive: George W. Bush is standing by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, whose confirmation has been thrown into doubt amid sexual assault allegationshttps://t.co/qhnhzXH32y

— POLITICO (@politico) September 18, 2018

It Was Only Horseplay That Did Not Happen At That Party He Definitely Did Not Attend Maybe

The thing about the conservative shit cannon is that it is always full of shit, but journalists love to explore each flung piece lovingly.

Notable update: Hatch spokesman now says Kavanaugh did not say what Hatch said he did. Instead, he says, Kavanaugh only said he was "not at any party like the one she describes."https://t.co/hXhD1GpIUO

— Dan Eggen (@DanEggenWPost) September 18, 2018

America's Worst Humans

Rosa Brooks.

They'll Know Better Next Time

Kavanaugh has a long history of being a corrupt partisan hack, a prejurer, and someone with frightening public views on "the law." No attempted rape necessary to know that self-described (if full of shit) liberal lawyers shouldn't be supporting him. At least the internet will remember their names forever!

Not Complicated

I've long been amazed that apparently no one said, "uh, guys, this isn't legal..." on the inside.

Facebook has met criticism in recent years over revelations that its technology allowed landlords to discriminate on the basis of race, and employers to discriminate on the basis of age. Now a group of job seekers is alleging that Facebook helps employers exclude female candidates from recruiting campaigns.

Get back to inventing the bus, techbros, it's what you do best.

Figuring Out How To Get In This Guy's Will

Good luck!

Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa stood before the audience gathered at SpaceX headquarters Monday evening and was greeted by cheers when he echoed a line from a famous speech by President John F. Kennedy, proclaiming "I choose to go to the moon."

Maezawa was introduced by SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk in Hawthorne, Calif. He is the first to book a trip as a private passenger with the commercial space company for a voyage that hasn't been attempted since NASA's Apollo missions ended in 1972.

A Tax On The Buyer

Like everything else with Trump, even if you have a sense that his instincts might, sort of, possibly, maybe (but probably not), be not be entirely wrong, you know that he has no idea what he's talking about so getting it right is about as likely as me being appointed Attorney General. One could spend all day doing "haha Trump is dumb" posts but this is something you know they have explained to him 700 times and he still doesn't get it.

At the White House, Trump wrongly said that “China is now paying us billions of dollars in tariffs” and he celebrated the Treasury Department collecting “tremendous amounts of money, which is great for our country.”

In fact, tariffs are taxes that are paid by Americans who import goods from abroad. Through the end of August, the administration had collected nearly $22 billion in revenue because of its new tariffs, according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.

It isn't that he's stupid, it's that he has brain worms, and he's going back in time. As happens.

They Knew

The thing about Kavanaugh is that it's 100% obvious that thew knew he had some sort of questionable incident(s) involving women in his past. The "he's a girls' basketball coach" is such a conservative way of trying to "deal" with that problem, even though it's actually the creepiest possible way to try to deal.

Knowing doesn't mean they believed it, and certainly didn't mean they cared about it other than as a LIEBERAL obstacle to conservative Nirvana, but they knew.

OTA

I pick on Tesla, but this is fast becoming an issue for everything. Just more important for high speed death machines.

A Tesla over-the-air update this week left the Consumer Reports Model 3 electric car without key features for more than a day, including automatic emergency braking (AEB) and Autopilot.

Happy Hour

enjoy

Shit Shotgun

We're in the middle of the "spray as much feces as you can against the wall and see what sticks" phase of the Kavanaugh defense. The latest is, and I am not making this up, that he clearly remembers that he was not at that party... you know... that party... on, um, that date... 30 years ago.

We will laugh, but the shit shotgun is effective, because our great cable news overlords will lovingly examine each shot of shit.

Perfectly Normal Behavior

I think horny teenagers have broken brains, and if you add a bit of alcohol they're even more broken, but nobody, not even the "bad kids," were open about thinking it was ok to try to rape a girl because she was drunk (or the guy was) back in the day. Sure there's a greater awareness, I think, that nonphysically but still coercive behavior is also, too, very bad, but holding a girl down and covering her mouth so she didn't scream while trying to rip off her clothes? Nobody would have said that was just normal teen behavior. (Obviously some people did it! That was very bad and they should have been, but would not likely have been, arrested.)

65 Classmates

I'm still marveling that they (and, yes, the "Chief Counsel for Nominations, United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary" did this, not some random hacks) pushed out the claim that "65 female high-school classmates" of a guy who went to a boys' school wrote a letter on his behalf.