Nothing to fear but fear itself

November 25, 2023November 25, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 31 Comments

The reports of a squadron of heavily armed Bentley Flying Spur medium-heavy bombers targeting the United States from a top-secret Canadian base seem to have been slightly exaggerated, if by “slightly exaggerated” we mean “fabricated out of whole cloth.”

“This confirms our worst fear: the explosion at Rainbow Bridge was a terrorist attack.” — Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Insult My Wife, Please)

“Today’s apparent terrorist attack must be a wake-up call to all Americans.” — Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Finance, Insurance & Banking)

“So it begins. We need to lock down the borders immediately. Full deportation efforts need to begin. The U.S. does not need to be the world’s hospitality suite any longer.” — Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Ashkenazi Catholicism)

Yes, a 2022 Bentley Flying Spur exploded at the Rainbow Bridge connecting the United States and Canada. Yes, two people died. And yes, many more people freaked the fuck out, thanks in large measure to (wait for it) the 101st Half Cocked Rapid Response Team at Faux News (h/t Charles P. Pierce at Esquire).

And then, the other combat boot dropped:

“But the FBI and other assisting agencies concluded within hours that the explosion was not a terrorist act and rather a terrible accident – possibly caused by a medical incident or a vehicle malfunction,” reported The Buffalo News, adding, “In 2021, the Australian government issued a limited recall of Bentleys over problems with the accelerator getting stuck.”

A medical incident. The accelerator getting stuck. The case handed over to local police as a traffic investigation.

Well. That’s entirely different, as Emily Litella might say.

Down here in our little corner of The Duck! City we have some small experience with airborne motor vehicles.

At least thrice in nine years some leadfooted yahoo who failed to grasp the concept that all roads eventually must end has rocketed up Comanche and through the stop sign at Camino de la Sierra only to find the pavement replaced with what appears to be, and in fact is, a short dirt ramp that launches them and their cobbled-together street-racing shitbox through a wire fence and into the cacti-and-rock-studded base of the Sandia Mountains after a brief flight of, oh, I don’t know, three to six feet.

The Wright Brothers did better than that in 1903, and they were just a couple of bike jockeys who took the scenic route to what their descendants would call “hucking,” “getting big air,” or “shredding the gnar.”

So we have never considered going to DEFCON 3 over it. Of course, none of our local test pilots has ever been incinerated. That we know of, anyway. Also, our little wire fence isn’t at an international border, and we don’t dream of it becoming a Wall.

On the wings of a dove

April 8, 2023April 8, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

The Duck! City is something of an aviary all of a sudden.

I’ve heard a couple hummingbirds buzzing around (haven’t actually seen one yet). Quail I have seen, and heard. Finches are hitting our feeders like the working press swarming an open bar.

And we have the usual dove nesting beneath the overhang by the front door.

Speaking of our feathered friends, it seems E. Lawn Mulch must’ve gotten lonely in those Twitter offices he’s worked so diligently to empty. His latest attention-getting ploy is to do a flyby on newsletter platform Substack, which has announced plans to launch the latest Next Twitter Thingie, called Notes.

Captain Free Speech — who croaked his own newsletter platform — has apparently gone all Twitter Über Alles on Substack, forbidding embedded tweets in Substack posts, links in tweets to Substack articles, etc., et al., and so on and so forth.

According to Taylor Lorenz at The Washington Post:

On Thursday, Substack writers discovered that they were no longer able to embed tweets in their Substack posts. Writers who tried were met with the message, “Twitter has unexpectedly restricted access to embedding tweets in Substack posts.”

On Friday morning, Twitter began blocking users from retweeting, liking or engaging with posts that contained links to Substack articles. Users also could not pin posts containing links to Substack to the top of their profiles. On Friday evening, Twitter began marking links to Substack as “unsafe.”

Even Substack’s corporate Twitter account was restricted, with users reporting that they were unable to retweet or quote-tweet the handle’s posts.

A number of Substack writers are very much not amused, among them Matt Taibbi, who announced that “beginning early next week I’ll be using the new Substack Notes feature (to which you’ll all have access) instead of Twitter. …”

Judd Legum, Matt Swider, and Laura Jedeed were likewise critical, with Jedeed telling The Verge that she sees subscription bumps “every time Musk does something stupid.”

“I think people realize Twitter is dying and they want to keep hearing from me after it falls apart,” she says. “He’s driving traffic my way by being stupid but, like everything he does, it’s killing the goose that lays the golden egg.”

Hey, dude’s still laying eggs. The smelly brown ones. Anyone promoting an online presence anywhere other than Twitter should probably invest in umbrellas and air fresheners.

Empty rituals

May 25, 2022May 25, 2022 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 31 Comments

In a perfect world, I would be writing about a cat in a sack, the hummingbird snuggled into a nest outside my office window, or the bunny that just hopped by underneath it.

This is not a perfect world.

I have nothing pertinent to add to what James Fallows has written on the four themes in “the empty rituals of a gun massacre.”

Closer to home, Texas Monthly Dan Solomon reminds us that Gov. Greg Abbott, who has overseen a steady expansion of gun rights, is even more clueless than the rest of us if he really thinks the latest massacre is “incomprehensible.”

Abbott, who first won election in 2014, has had a lot of opportunities to learn how to comprehend this kind of violence. In November 2017, a man entered the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs and killed 26 people. Six months later, a seventeen-year-old high school student shot and killed eight of his classmates and two teachers at Santa Fe High School, outside of Houston. A little more than a year later, in August 2019, a far-right gunman who had posted a manifesto online drove from Dallas to El Paso and murdered 23 shoppers in a Walmart. Later that month, a shooter killed 7 people in Odessa and injured 25 others. Thus far in 2022 alone, there have been 21 mass shootings in Texas. Uvalde is just the deadliest.

I’m not singling out Texas. Here in The Duck! City we have teenagers shooting up gas stations (and killing all the wrong people) over drug deals gone sideways. Plus, New Mexico leads the nation in pedestrian deaths per resident population, traffic deaths being another problem we have decided to do nothing about (beyond jacking our jaws, that is).

These are problems with solutions. We have decided not to solve them. We love our SUVs and our AR-15s. The body count is something the survivors have agreed we can live with.

More, late*

December 21, 2020 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments

“Pandemic Deal by Congress Provides Economic Relief, for Now,” reports The New York Times.

But it’s too little, too late, and perhaps the last of Uncle Sammy’s pennies in the ol’ tin cup for a while, adds The Old Grey Hoor, in an analysis by Ben Casselman and Jim Tankersley.

The injection of money comes months too late for tens of thousands of failed businesses, however, and it may not be enough to sustain unemployed workers until the labor market rebounds. Moreover, it could be the last help from Washington the economy gets anytime soon.

Call me cynical, but I think we need some brighter bulbs on this job.

*Apologies to Chris in the Morning.

‘Wicked, tricksy, false!’

October 4, 2020October 4, 2020 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 27 Comments

“I’m just peachy, really. Tip-top, actually. Never better. Back at the ol’ desk any day now.”

Well, we seem to have blown right past the question of whether Bugsy Sméagol has The Plague and are now deep into the slimy weeds of lies surrounding just how bad his case might be, O yes, my precious.

This, oddly, may be the one thing about this “presidency” that is not unique, as Chazbo Pierce points out in his weekly letter from The Shebeen (subscription required).

Diseases have croaked as many presidents as have bullets (four apiece). And plenty of administrations have concealed the fact that the president was teetering on the edge of eternity, or at least a couple tacos short of a combo plate.

Now instead of trotting out a platoon of generals or economists to give us the old hocus, and also the pocus, Bugsy’s handlers send us a squad of Walter Reed whitecoats to add their spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, i.e., what The New York Times calls “conflicting accounts” of his condition.

Over at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum draws our attention to the sociopath behind the curtain, giving us the timeline as he sees it and calling the conduct of Bugsy and his goons “reckless beyond belief.”

I find it entirely believable, but hey, let’s agree to disagree.

This is a cult of personality we’ve been dealing with since Bugsy surfed the golden escalator into the GOP presidential pissing match, in which he proved to be the biggest dick.

You don’t get stand-up guys in a cult. What you get is scabby-kneed old hoors with calluses on the insides of their mouths. Bloated ticks sporting American-flag lapel pins. The occasional professional rat who knows the fastest way off a sinking ship and through a publisher’s office into the talk-show green rooms.

Nobody had the stones to get a hammerlock on Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, either, mostly because those gentlemen would have had them ground into puppy treats for the guard dogs.

This guy may kill a few of his punks too. Not because they stood up to him, but because they bowed down to him, with their faces hanging out in his toxic wind.

Until and unless The Plague gets them, the only thing these spineless hooters are scared of is missing out on their sip from the gravy boat as it goes around The Big Table.