Thor is taking a few tentative swings with Mjölnir this morning.
The arm and knee warmers have begun tagging along on my morning rides.
I don’t always wear ’em, but it’s nice to know I have ’em. Just in case.
If I were riding today I’d pack a rain jacket, because the NWS boyos are calling for thunderbummers. And snow? Really? In the higher elevations, to be sure, but still, damn. You’d think it was almost October or sumpin’.
Speaking of a chill in high places, I see the usual rampant dipshittery has hit a frosty new low in DeeCee. Fuck me running, but it has become wearisome to watch our national “leadership” rolling around in that big ol’ barrel of titties and telling the rest of us to go suck on our thumbs.
Can we get a conservatorship established to oversee this mess? Maybe Britney Spears could recommend someone. Then again, maybe not.
Personally, I’d like to see more than a few of these Gilded Age fuck-bubbles loaded aboard the next Jeff Bozos dick-missile to the stars, with nothing to eat but each other, but only if we’re talking a one-way ticket.
I suppose we’d wind up replacing them with more of the same. But maybe the new crowd might think about dinner and a movie, and maybe kissing us, before sticking it in.
Mad Blog Media 
September 30, 2021 at 9:31 am |
I should probably follow the Dee Cee Follies more closely, but all I want to do when I read or listen to it is beat my head against the wall. Seems to me they should split the difference on this 3.5 trillion dollar Brave New World Bill and sign off. I’ll a little sick and tired of the left vs. right sanctimonious food fight. Progressives don’t have a majority in the Senate. Period. Put the dicks back in the pants, make nice, and get something done for the people. The public cynicism is not good for anyone, nor is gridlock.
September 30, 2021 at 11:11 am |
They, the politicians, don’t give a shit about you and me. Haven’t for decades. A massive die off of old stupid people might be the only hope.
One half of inch of rain this morning accompanied by flashes and booms. Weird, but we will take it so the mountains don’t burn down this spring.
September 30, 2021 at 11:16 am |
I think those billionaires should be building a rocket big enough to hold the 10% farthest left and 10% farthest right people from both the Senate and the House and shoot them into space without a return capability. Then start over.
October 1, 2021 at 7:26 am |
Trouble is, we got a bunch of young dummies queueing up to replace the old ones.
A line from “The Catcher in the Rye” popped into my head this morning as I was scanning the news about the ongoing clusterfuckery in DeeCee.
Mr. Antolini, one of Holden Caulfield’s teachers in J.D. Salinger’s novel, delivers a quote from psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel: “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”
I’m not seeing a lot of humility among the tub-thumpers in Congress. These yammerheads make more bad noise than a rusty chain. Kevin Drum thinks we smirking libtards are blowing the chance of a generation.
Speaking of rusty chains, we got more than a half inch of rain yesterday. So, yay, etc. Fender time!
October 1, 2021 at 8:50 am |
Funny, I just sent Rep. Leger-Fernandez almost exactly the same words that Kevin Drum uses in a NastyGram. I guess I’m not the only boneheadedly-pragmatic Democrat left in the party looking at the long haul rather than the response of the Twitterati.
Thanks for the link. I’ve spent all of yesterday being Tweet-flamed (ratioed?) for agreeing with Kevin.
October 1, 2021 at 10:30 am |
I used to agree with “incremental progress beats postponed perfection”, but as the climate tipping point zooms toward us at frightening speed, I think it’s time for the whole enchilada- now. I know that doesn’t work for a lot of folks, but then again, in the seventies, I thought the wisdom of getting rid of the internal combustion engine was self evident. I know, naïve.
October 1, 2021 at 11:01 am |
Well, if you let perfect be the enemy of good, there is a half a chance that we won’t get squat right away, which is problematic. Nancy says there will be a vote today. Keep your fingers crossed.
As far as climate, even getting Uncle Sam back to the Paris Accords is not enough to keep the projected (model driven) temperatures below 1.5C according to some**, since the United States no longer leads in emissions and we continue to buy cheap shit from that country which does lead in emissions; China has double our emissions as we continue to outsource production to Asia. Not to mention India, etc.
** https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/paris-global-climate-change-agreements
I’m not a fan of taking the media alarmism as gospel because the science ain’t that black and white in its details, but we are heating up Gaia and that is not in doubt. How much is where people are engaging in legitimate disagreement. Short term trends don’t equate to long term projections. I tend to be a pessimist and think it might be worse than the middle of the road projections due to all the known unknowns such as methane release as things defrost, i.e., positive feedback. We just don’t know, so I say slow down the GHG belching until we do. Hence my personal goal to lower my personal carbon footprint regardless of what the politicians do. That means less consumption in a nation that worships consumption. If you want to barf, look at this month’s Buycycling Magazine.
I don’t know what will happen with the mid-terms. My political crystal ball long ago fogged up. I do expect a lot of pissing and finger pointing about whose fault it is that things are fucked up. .But my hunch is if Dems engage in the usual circular firing squad, it will not go well for the Blue team next year. A fair number of people voted Blue because the other team should be in padded cells, so maybe that can work in our favor. Disclosure, although some call me a DINO, and perhaps I am, I’ve been a registered Donk for as long as I can remember being registered.
October 1, 2021 at 1:20 pm |
Kevin Drum has argued for a while now that the country leans conservative, not liberal, and that we’d be best served by striving for measures that appeal to voters in purple districts. Not everyone is Bernie Sanders, but likewise not everyone is Mike Lee. We’re most of us somewhere in between. So get more people voting Democratic more often, further marginalize the GOP, and try to get some shit done.
The stumbling blocks are too numerous to list. Chief among them, I think, is the feeling that those guys don’t give a shit about me. And that effecting change will be about as easy as changing the direction of the USS Gerald R. Ford using a popsicle stick for a rudder. I notice Walmart and Amazon likewise seem disinterested in my hopes and dreams.
All this being said, Herself is out there right now, stumping the ’hood for a candidate. Illegitimi non carborundum, y’all.
• Click here for a bigger version.
October 1, 2021 at 2:13 pm |
I agree Khal. The science is overwhelming, 90 percent probability, that the climate is getting warmer and human activity is the cause. It’s the stuff we don’t know, like where the tipping point is that trips the acceleration of change out of any human control, that is scary but entertaining.
October 1, 2021 at 3:36 pm |
Yep. The poorly constrained feedbacks such as methane releases, the forcing factors of aerosols, etc, are the jokers in the deck. Doing nothing about emissions is like going around a blind curve in the road at 20 over the speed limit even though you know the bars just let out at 2 a.m. You don’t know exactly where the drunks are, but you know they are out there.
Pisser? I replaced an electric stove up in Los Alamos a few years back with a gas range. I never cared for electric cooking and besides, in New Mexico a shitload of our electricity at the time, almost two-thirds, came from burning coal, so I said as I wrote the check. Now Martin Heinrich tells me I’m an asshole. Go figure. No one wants to toss away durable goods for something 20,30,40 yrs down the line. At least normal people. The way to do this is invent something better, get the inevitable turnover, and make both Gaia and the public happy. Meanwhile put a carbon tax on shit so that the stuff being schlepped over from China gets taxed for their coal and for the container ship and the train and the truck.
That’s a good piece by Carlin. I’m starting to feel that way too. Someone made up a bumper sticker “Giant Meteor, 2020”. I see the 2024 version is already on the market.
October 1, 2021 at 3:39 pm
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_Mexico_Electricity_Sources.svg
October 1, 2021 at 8:09 pm
It puzzles me as to why the southwest doesn’t have massive amounts of solar farms. Here in the Mitten State we are getting more and more and we have a fraction of the sunny days y’all have. It’s too bad that Haiti and Puerto Rico can’t build some of the stuff we seem to think we need from China. And now huge amounts of footwear and clothing are coming from Vietnam. As Khal points out the amount of energy expended to ship our precious crap from the Orient will keep the amounts of fossil fuels burning and churning. So you need some wine glasses? A crescent wrench? Those containers will have to keep coming from China since you can look high and low for domestic sources to no avail.
October 1, 2021 at 9:26 pm
For solar and wind to take the place of gas and oil (our two biggest sources), I think someone has to develop storage capacity. The sun isn’t out when the heat and lights are on. If storage is giant batteries, I think the chemical and mining industries will be quite pleased.
October 2, 2021 at 5:55 am
I think part of the problem is that everyone is looking for a single large scale solution. If existing technology (solar, geothermal, wind, and conservation) was brought down to the the point of use level the reduction in fossil fuel use would be, as Bernie says, huge! Most large problems consist of many small problems. Simplify and then solve.
October 1, 2021 at 7:52 am |
Not cold here yet but cooler. Cool enough to start dragging out the bikepacking gear. We were in southeast Tennessee last week for a quick getaway. That area is almost perfect for bikepacking except for the steep-ass mountain roads. It’s hard enough dragging a nekkid bike up those grades let alone camping gear. Still, it’s probably better than sitting at a desk all week.
October 2, 2021 at 6:15 am |
Khal you are right about the battery/storage issues but peak power consumption across the USA is during daylight hours in both summer and winter. Research is showing alarming rates of C02 in homes that cook with gas with either poor venting or excellent sealing/insulation. Like many pro chefs we simply cannot cook on electric stoves in our household. We can learn. Lots of habits and lifestyle changes coming down the pike and my fear is that many Americans are too lazy, stubborn and stupid to adopt them. At the end of the day mining coal and transporting it via diesel train to power plants is nuts even if burning the coal left zero emissions which we all know it does.My son worked for a major utility and said their so called scrubbers were totally ineffective most of the time. Thankfully they are decommissioning them (coal plants) slowly but surely.
October 2, 2021 at 7:24 am |
Right you are Herb. If solar and wind provided all of our daylight power needs, coal plants would be gone. Natural gas would fill in at night. Not a total solution, but a large reduction. No time to wait for the silver bullet, especially with electric cars and bikes being all the rage. Most people can’t afford the point of use solar technology. That requires government and business leadership with vision and resolve. We don’t have that. Their solution years ago to pollution was to offshore it with the labor. More profit short term.
October 2, 2021 at 9:10 am |
When Gen IV nuclear power is in the mix, I’ll sign on. Until then, political ideology and paranoia of all things nuclear are trumping reality. A modern nuke plant is on when you need it, creates ounces rather than tons of waste, and can be throttled down when there is plenty of wind and sun out. Nuclear fuel can be bred in a reactor. We’ve known since I was in graduate school how to sequester waste. I almost did a Ph.D. on something called “Synrock” (storing high level waste in a ceramic designed to hold nuclear waste, which is far more stable than glass or concrete) but my advisor was ambivalent about the project as it wasn’t the kind of work he wanted in his limited lab space.Shit, if it eventually is adopted we both might have been Nobel laureates! Yes, there are proliferation concerns with nuclear but if we don’t get sustainable, war is inevitable anyway as people fight over diminishing resources and changes in climate zones.
All these problems are solvable with enough little solutions and some dedicated change, as Pat says. Fossil fuels will eventually run out or get more expensive and hazardous to extract–we see that already with hydrofracking. If humanity is to persist for a while, we need to get our energy needs met in a way that uses methods that don’t run out of raw materials or dump fluorocarbons, GHG’s, mercury, and other cool stuff into our air water, and food.
Then again, I suspect George Carlin has a point. Why get so wound up? Humanity loves to play Russian Roulette with its future and one day the chamber will not be empty.
Big article in the Journal about making hydrogen out of methane. But nowhere, unless I missed it, is an explanation of where the plant is going to get all the energy to crack the methane. Let me guess….
https://www.abqjournal.com/2434597/governor-plans-major-push-to-make-nm-a-hydrogen-hub.html
What the public really wants is a perpetual motion machine, so we can go on living business as usual with no consequences. Me? I’ll be checking out in a few decades, Probably sooner given the way people drive around here and with all the crazies shooting up the place. No kids, so my carbon footprint will go away. I wish the future luck, but all species eventually go extinct. Ours will likely be at our own hand as we continue to eat ourselves out of house and home and shit our nest.
October 2, 2021 at 8:51 am |
Might be time to watch “Idiocracy” again. Where is President Camacho? We need you!