From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
The Future of Humanity: A Snapshot
The annual Beloit College Mindset List from the Wisconsin school (Go, Fightin' Buccaneers!) is out and generating the usual gasps and titters. The annual list reflects on how the mental cards are stacked in the collective minds of the college Class of 2020, meaning you whippersnappers born in 1998---a year after the departures of Mother Teresa, Chris Farley, Princess Diana and The Notorious B.I.G. Here's a sample of their world:
• The United States has always been at war.
• Vladimir Putin has always been calling the shots at the Kremlin.
• The Sandy Hook tragedy is their Columbine.
• Cloning has always been a mundane laboratory procedure.
• There has always been a digital swap meet called eBay.
• Serena Williams has always been winning Grand Slam singles titles.
• Each year they've been alive the U.S. population has grown by more than one million Latinos.
• Vaccines have always been erroneously linked to autism.
• A Bush and a Clinton have always been campaigning for something big.
• Snowboarding has always been an Olympic sport.
• They have never seen billboard ads for cigarettes.
• Robots have always been surgical partners in the O.R.
I’ll add my usual contribution to the list: Republicans have always been incompetent hacks, paranoid loons, and/or obstructionist jerks. That one seems to be timeless.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Tuesday, August 23, 2016
Note: Any Democratic candidate who isn't producing an ad welding their opponent to Donald Trump is committing campaign malpractice. ---Unanimous ruling of the American Political Consultant Association
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til the National Park Service turns 100: 2
Days 'til the Plymouth Waterfront Festival, including rubber ducky race and special guest star The Rock (Plymouth Rock, that is! Ha Ha!!!): 4
Number of space walks conducted at the International Space Station: 194
Percent of registered Democratic and Republican voters in Nevada, respectively, who believe that America is great, according to a new Suffolk University poll: 85%, 66%
Year during which the testing of self-driving cars is expected to start on Ohio's stretch of Interstate 80: 2017
Maine's current unemployment rate: 3.9%
Maximum speed of the 2,200-foot zip line at Niagara Falls: 40mph
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Tuesday Words of Wisdom from the Right-wing Blogosphere:
With Trump's campaign now being run by the ghost of Andrew Breitbart, it would be rude not to check in and see what their commenters are burping up these days:
"Why the heck is Hillary ahead in the key states. The fix is in!!! But I think this time the people will rise up and there will be a revolution if she wins."
"Dear Hillary-If you ever feel yourself "short circuiting" again, you can always plug yourself into a nearby outlet socket. This should solve the problem...permanently!" VOTE TRUMP/PENCE IN 2016!!!
"Is that why Hillary wears those pajama tent outfits to rallies? To hide her medical assistant devices?
"Just pray she stay’s close in the polls for another month. The moment the Dems realize she will not win, they will call in a substitute---Biden. I do not want to see that. I want all ballots printed and Clinton reach the point of no return."
"Merkel is a commie, she is from East Germany and her parents were big commies."
All together now: 1…2…3...Classy!
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Puppy Pic of the Day Adele: "It's not easy to get a dog into a show. You have to shove him down your pants or something?"
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CHEERS to POTUS in flight. Things are a bit better in Louisiana, but far from back to normal or even semi-normal. Officials would prefer that President Obama wait a bit longer before they have to peel off resources and manpower to accommodate his visit there. But the right-wingers (and far too many blue-dog-type enablers on the left) are howling at him to race down there. So…today he'll fire up Jetpack One and git 'er done. Whereas Trump the Unhelpful swooped in, hugged victims like they were lepers and passed out tubs of Play-Doh (WTF???) while looking bored out of his mind, Obama will huddle with emergency management officials at all levels, get first-hand accounts from residents, take stock of available resources, unclog bottlenecks where necessary, do a lot of listening, and then go back to D.C. where he'll continue to stay on top of the situation. Because that's what grown-ups do. Speaking of which: Good morning, Hillary.
JEERS to tiny tots working for Mr. Tiny Hands. Speaking of Play-Doh, in Colorado, a 12-year-old is running the day-to-day operations of Donald Trump’s Jefferson County field office. He’s replacing the four-year-old whose phone-banking efforts resulted in a grand total of zero dollars and 29 Elmo blankies.
JEERS to haters in black robes. In the course of human events (where have I heard that before?), the LGBT community will eventually secure equal rights. But along the way we're going to have to deal with the occasional setback dealt by assholes and their religious hang-ups. The newest asshole to make the papers is…Judge Fuckwad McWhinybritches:
Months after the Obama administration advised school districts that transgender students should be given access to bathrooms based on their gender identity, a federal judge in Texas has blocked the guidance from going into effect---for now.
U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor has granted a preliminary, nationwide injunction in response to a lawsuit filed by Texas and a number of other states. […]
The preliminary injunction would mean that, until that lawsuit works its way through the courts, the "status quo" would be maintained and the guidance could not be considered enforceable.
The guidance from the White House was issued in May, and addresses the Title IX requirement that schools receiving federal funding not discriminate against students on the basis of sex.
According to an ACLU attorney, the White House will move up the food chain to get the injunction un-injunctioned via an appeals court or even the Supremes, so stay tuned. In the meantime, trans kids, Uncle Billy gives you permission to pee in a jar and leave it on Judge O'Connor's doorstep. But don’t be uncouth---tie a rainbow ribbon around it.
CHEERS to the great pretender. Wow---you remember last year when Jimmy Carter announced that he had cancer in his brain? He was talking with reporters and told them he put on a happy face, even though he had every expectation of being dead in less than three weeks. That was a year ago. Yesterday he was helping out at his annual Habitat for Humanity event (dude’s 92):
Carter underwent treatment with a new drug, Keytruda, and by last December, he dramatically announced at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, where he frequently teaches Sunday school, that the cancer had disappeared. Four months later, he told the congregation that scans showed he was free of cancer and was able to end treatments. […]
The Habitat project the Carters kicked off Monday is the 33rd they've undertaken just in Memphis — an indication of the whirlwind schedule that the former president and Rosalynn Carter, 89, have continued to keep. This week, they're helping to build 19 new homes for low-income families in the area.
"We've had a lot of opportunities for our kids and grandkids to go to school," Jimmy Carter said. "And we're working side by side with families who haven't had all those things.
Oh, waitress? I'll have whatever he's having.
CHEERS to pissing off the man in curlers. On this date in 1775, King George III got all pissy and accused the colonies of being in "an open and avowed rebellion" and asked "our obedient and loyal subjects to use their utmost endeavours to withstand and suppress such rebellion, and to disclose and make known all treasons and traitorous conspiracies which they shall know to be against us." And we were all, like, "Huh? Are you referring to little old us? Why, we’re just grubby li'l old farmers and fussy old shopkeepers---we wouldn’t hurt a fly!" Then we declared independence and kicked his ass. Psych!
JEERS to closing the barn door after the horse has left. Oh, now he's sorry…
An Islamist militant has admitted destroying cultural sites in Timbuktu, Mali, in a landmark trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi said he was "really sorry" for his actions and asked for forgiveness. He was accused of leading rebel forces who destroyed historic shrines at the world heritage site in 2012. […]
Court documents describe Mahdi as a religious scholar who directed fighters to wreck several sites with pickaxes and chisels after failing to deter locals from praying at them. He was charged with war crimes over the destruction of nine mausoleums and a mosque. Pleading guilty, he said: "I am really sorry, I am really remorseful, and I regret all the damage that my actions have caused.
No problem. We've trucked in all the rubble you created, Ahmad...and here's some glue. Just put it all back together the way it was and we'll let bygones be bygones. One small caveat: you have 15 minutes. GO!
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Ten years ago in C&J: August 23, 2006
CHEERS to the Democrat more Democrats should be like. Yeah...good ol' Russ:
U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold told a group of Madison area residents this morning that the ongoing U.S. presence in Iraq is the result of an "outrageous pile of lies" and called for more accountability.
"The Bush administration should take accountability for being stuck there and not admitting mistakes..."
Feingold trumpeted his state-based health care reform act, which would authorize pilot programs for universal health care coverage in individual states. "In my 14 years of holding listening sessions across the state, Wisconsinites have mentioned health care more than any other issue. With an American-style approach to reform that gives flexibility to the states and fuels innovation, real health care reform is within reach," he said.
Good. Because the guys currently in power are making me sick.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to cool science. Are you now, or have you ever been, a knuckle-cracker for the Communist party ANSWER THE QUESTION AND I REMIND YOU YOU’RE UNDER OATH!!!! Sorry---I get a little worked up over knuckle-cracking. I rarely do it, but when I do it's a petite single-finger pull followed by a gentle pop, as opposed to the barbaric practice of lacing your fingers together and turning them inside out to create the cacophony equivalent to an elephant stomping on a sheet of bubble wrap in a thunderstorm. My mom wouldn’t have any of it from us kids because she said it would give us hairy palms (everything she deemed bad would give us hairy palms if she drank enough Schlitz). I wish she was around to see the results of this study:
The knuckle-crackers didn't have any hand problems.
In fact, after someone cracked a knuckle, it had an increased range of motion compared with knuckles they hadn't cracked. The study, which has not been published, was presented in December at a meeting of the Radiological Society of North America. […]
Even so, [study authors Robert] Boutin and [Robert] Szabo are the first to say their study isn't the final word on knuckle-cracking, especially since they looked only at short-term, and not long-term, effects. … "Knuckle kerfuffles are copious," Boutin wrote in an email, with a smiley-face emoji at the end of his sentence.
Thanks to the above article I plan to crack my knuckles even more often, because I learned that "when you crack a knuckle, you're pulling apart two surfaces of the joint, which brings down the pressure in the joint. That negative pressure allows gas that's dissolved in the fluid in your joints to be liberated." In other words, it's a finger fart! And I have much lost time to make up.
Have a nice Tuesday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
Pfizer Inc. said Monday that it had agreed to buy Cheers and Jeers for about $14 billion, in a move that adds one of the crown jewels of the multibillion-dollar market for kiddie pools to Pfizer’s portfolio.
---The Wall Street Journal
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