These are interesting times, there’s no denying that.  We live through a ‘new norm’ just about every day.  The older we get, the more we pine for the “old days”

, because things were “so much simpler then”.

I will try to update the daily headlines that caught my attention each day for the next week or so.  Just because I post ’em, doesn’t mean I endorse any of it.

Today’s image is from:  Reddit.

 

This is an open thread.


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By I'm THAT Guy

"Well, ya gotta have someone to yell at"

29 thoughts on “May You Live in Interesting Times – 8/30/2023”
    1. I know there has been a lot of research and development going into carbon fiber and nanotube technologies. Wearable computer clothing, for example, where your shirt is your computer, or something like that. I have a carbon fiber hood on my car that is lighter than a metal one and stronger, even. I’ve heard of some successes in creating a carbon fiber car body that is also a solar panel.

      Is any of this stuff at a production stage yet? Probably not.

      It’s ‘exciting’ to talk about all the potential gains and uses for this kind of stuff, but what’s the cost? Are the materials renewable, or is it yet another element we have to go to the ends of the earth to mine for?

      1. The article says that the material is (gasp!) derived from petroleum. The greens are going to tie themselves in knots when it is clear that to gain more “green” stuff you need more petroleum stuff, not to mention nuclear power. Pass the popcorn.

      2. Yes, petroleum gets a bad rap, thanks mostly to to the burning of gasoline.

        Gasoline is basically a waste product from the production of other materials such as plastics, pharmaceuticals, and even the keyboards people use to complain about oil.

        All those wind turbines? Yeah, they need lubrication, and where do they get that? That’s right, petroleum. You also can’t make solar panels without petroleum.

        All those tires on the vehicles that get people around? They aren’t rubber, they are a petroleum product.

        Nuclear energy technology has changed considerably over the past twenty-five years or so. There are smaller, and better designed systems now that can operate on nuclear waste. I have been following Bill Gates’ foray into nuclear power with his company TerraPower. Last week they announced that they’ve purchased property in Wyoming to build a demonstration plant. A Lefty like Bill Gates getting involved in nuclear energy? He needs to turn in his Lefty Card, dammit! LOL

        I try to ignore the loud people in the room babbling on about how bad oil is yadda yadda yadda.

  1. BIDEN SENDS THE BAD-TASTE METER TO THE TOP
     
    As historic wildfires raged across the Hawaiian island of Maui over the past two weeks, claiming hundreds of lives and scorching thousands of acres, President Joe Biden managed to take two vacations, padding his record of over 365 vacation days since taking office. [He’s taken a YEAR of vacation since becoming president!]
    Facing significant pressure to do so — especially after an early refusal to comment on the disaster — he cut short his second vacation and made his way to Maui on Monday.
    The environmentally conscious president and his nearly 30-car motorcade passing disgruntled residents who jeered him, yelling, “Thanks for nothing!” and “Go home, Joe!”
    Other residents who confronted Biden along the way held signs that read “F*** Biden” and “Trump Won.” Others held signs near Kapalua Airport, where the president touched down, that read, “It’s too late.”
    The New York Post noted that there were additional signs amid the ash and ruin in Lahaina that said, “Action speaks louder than words” and “FJB,” as well as “No comment,” in reference to Biden’s Aug. 13 refusal to address the tragedy while vacationing in Delaware.
    After joking about the ground being hot and a cadaver dog’s boots, he made a speech. While he remembered the name of the island this time around, the 80-year-old president mispronounced the names of multiple Hawaiian officials and called the disaster an “unimaginable travedy.”[travedy?]
    Biden later addressed another crowd at the Lahaina Civic Center, where he drew a parallel between the deadly inferno, which has reportedly claimed more than 480 lives, and the near-loss of his beloved ’67 Corvette as the result of a kitchen fire.
    “I don’t want to compare difficulties, [and then goes on to do just that!] but we have a little sense, Jill and I, of what it’s like to lose a home,” said Biden. “To make a long story short, I almost lost my wife, my ’67 Corvette, and my cat,
    A restaurant owner in Kihei, Maui, told the Daily Signal that Biden’s comparison was “the most despicable thing this president has ever said,” adding, “How do you compare almost losing your f****** Corvette to the children burned in their f****** homes, man?”
    https://www.theblaze.com/news/biden-gets-booed-in-maui-then-makes-matters-worse-by-comparing-devastating-blazes-that-killed-hundreds-to-nearly-losing-his-corvette-in-a-fire

    1. Why do you always provide an abundance of low-hanging fruit to pick from? Strategy in posing arguments isn’t one of your strong suits, since you leave yourself WIDE open when you post idiocy like this:

      As historic wildfires raged across the Hawaiian island of Maui over the past two weeks, claiming hundreds of lives and scorching thousands of acres, President Joe Biden managed to take two vacations, padding his record of over 365 vacation days since taking office. [He’s taken a YEAR of vacation since becoming president!]

      You should have already anticipated what I was going to toss back at you without any effort:

      Trump ended up spending a total of 307 days golfing during his term. In 2017, Trump spent three months’ time — 91 days — on the golf course. In 2018, Trump spent 75 days playing golf. In 2019, Trump spent 87 days on a golf course and in 2020, Trump spent 54 days playing golf — even during the deadliest year for the U.S. since World War II which featured 291,557 fatalities.

      Tit, meet Tat.

      Facing significant pressure to do so — especially after an early refusal to comment on the disaster .. .

      Was there a “refusal”, or is that just the The Blaze telling you that? Did you bother to read the link you provided in your cut and paste? Here, let me help you:

      According to Bloomberg correspondent Justin Sink, after spending a few hours sunbathing on the beach near his home, when asked about the death toll on the island, Biden replied with a “no comment,” before leaving.

      Asked by several reporters camped outside earlier in the day whether he could stop riding his bike to talk about the devastating blazes, Biden responded: “We’re looking at it.”

      Is this a ‘refusal’, or is this a guy relaxing on his vacation not wanting to talk to anyone at the moment? I can just imagine if in some alternate universe I was a president on a break trying to relax and enjoy myself only to be bombarded by reporters on any given subject. I can tell you with no hesitation that my first response would be something along the lines of “FUCK OFF!”, followed by a whole lot of cussing. (no exaggeration here, I actually loathe being interrupted from being in my own groove. — one of the many reasons why I am not a POTUS…)

      I suspect that Biden probably didn’t have much current information on the Maui situation, and given the fact that he is a walking, talking gaffe machine, it was probably best that he kept to the “no comment” or “we’re looking into that” routine. Was it the best response he could have made? For Joe, maybe, but the public optics certainly isn’t great.

      QUESTION: Did Biden refuse to declare an emergency and/or get federal equipment and aid out? Did he go to toss a bunch of paper towels at the crowd?

      After joking about the ground being hot and a cadaver dog’s boots, he made a speech. While he remembered the name of the island this time around, the 80-year-old president mispronounced the names of multiple Hawaiian officials and called the disaster an “unimaginable travedy.”[travedy?]

      http://nicedoggie.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/WellGeeWally.jpg

      What part of Joe Biden having a speech impediment do you fail to understand? The man can mangle the word, “b-b-b-but” on a good day. It’s something that virtually everyone has known about the guy since he started in public life sometime around the 1800s or so.

      Biden later addressed another crowd at the Lahaina Civic Center, where he drew a parallel between the deadly inferno, which has reportedly claimed more than 480 lives, and the near-loss of his beloved ’67 Corvette as the result of a kitchen fire.

      One of the things that I’ve noticed about Trumpublicans is their lack of a sense of empathy. It’s a concept that seems to be foreign to you. You ridicule Biden’s attempt at being empathetic.

      Currently, there is no where near 480 people dead in this fire. Even the headline of the Blaze should have been a clue for you:

      Maui’s wildfire death toll officially 114, but locals running out of body bags reckon it’s closer to 500, with thousands still missing

      “reckon”, meaning a whole lot of guessing. Currently, as I write this, the death total is at 115. WILL it go to 200, 400, 1000? While there are roughly a thousand people “missing”, many of those names are duplicates from several different lists. But boy, if you really want to juice up an outrage, go for the high number.

      To be perfectly honest with you, I haven’t kept up with any of this. In fact, the most effort I’ve put into thinking about any of this is right here, right now.

      I have a strong suspicion that Joe Biden will not be the 2024 democratic candidate. I’d elaborate further on this, but I am up against a time wall. Maybe later…

      1. Once again, you revert to Trump. You are obsessed with him. Does Trump have anything to do with Hawaii?

        “No comment” is a refusal to comment.
        Why didn’t he know what was going on? It was all over the news, even I knew what was going on. It’s his JOB to know what’s going on in the country, he supposedly has people to brief him.  A whole city was destroyed and he couldn’t be bothered to do ANYTHING.

        Again with the speech defect defense. How many times are you going to use that? Does it work when he confuses Russia and Iraq?

        He’s being empathetic by comparing burning CHILDREN to his CORVETTE? Very empathetic. Just like comparing his son, who died of a brain tumor, to the Gold Star families whose children died by being blown up in Afghanistan during HIS botched withdrawal? And yes, it was botched, a new book just came out delineating all the mistakes. I’ll look it up for you.

        I just saw a video of people in Hawaii, and one man made a very good point. Pearl Harbor is the largest naval and Marine base. Why didn’t they send help? Could it be that no one was awake? Or no one cared? Or his Secretary of the Navy was incompetent? https://youtu.be/wBAv3R2qUjo  We got to Ukraine quicker than to Maui.

      2. If you are going to continue to throw out things that can EASILY be compared to the Trump era where you sat on your ass and said absolutely nothing about the almost exact shit you are complaining about now, then yes, I will continue to throw it right back in your face. Wake up.

        It was YOU who made a huge deal about the number of days that Joe Biden has gone home, or on vacation since he’s been president, yet you said nothing then the guy you support spent all of his time either at Mar-a-Lago or out golfing, or both.

        You cannot talk about Biden’s time away from the White House without comparing others — in this case, Donald Trump — if for no other reason than to establish a ‘norm’.

        You complain that Joe Biden is “on vacation” too much. It turns out that he’s following the same pattern of Trump, and for pretty much the same reasons: Trump thought the White House was a “dump”, while Biden feels the place is “boring” and “uncomfortable”. Most of the time away falls on the weekends and holidays, and the majority of trips away are to his home in Delaware. Trump exclusively went to properties that he owned and were related to his businesses.

        A president doesn’t stop being president if he’s away from the White House. He’s in constant contact with everything, and has people in places Where he sleeps makes no difference. Or does it? Is this only important when the president is from the “other side”?

        Because your weird complaint about me bringing up Trump every time you provide the opportunity to easily make a comparison where you said nothing, is “whack” as the kids say these days. I mean, the obvious comeback will always be the comparison. If you don’t like it, then don’t be offering up such low-hanging fruit.

        You are obsessed with him.

        http://nicedoggie.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/WellGeeWally.jpg

        Yeah, that must be it. :em05:

        http://nicedoggie.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/TriggeWarning.png

        He’s kinda hard to ignore these days. If I were “obsessed” with the guy, I would be talking non-stop about the GIANT ELEPHANT in the room here.

        I wouldn’t be going out of my way to filter out the 95 percent of the memes in my memebox to share here with y’all every day for the past couple of weeks, and I wouldn’t have had to post a Dalek from Doctor Who as a feature image this morning. So no, I tend to make a HUGE effort to go out of my way to avoid thinking about him.

        It’s that when you make a lot of noise about something that you’ve been quiet about before, then you HAVE to expect someone to point that out. It’s a two-way street.

        “No comment” is a refusal to comment.

        A refusal to comment is to not say anything at all. “No comment” IS a comment. It’s shorthand for, “I’m not going to answer your questions”. But it is still technically a comment.

        “No comment” is a refusal to answer.

        Which would you rather have had, a “no comment” or the wrong answer? If you are expecting any politician to say, “I don’t know”, then you’d be waiting a very long time. The seasoned politician knows better than to riff off the top of his head on a subject that he or she has little knowledge of, especially THIS one, who already has a knack for mangling a statement.

        http://nicedoggie.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/TriggeWarning.png

        By comparison, if Trump didn’t know the answer, he would improvise, usually with a lie. If it was a question from a reporter he didn’t like, he would say they were being “nasty”. But he, too, was never going to say he “doesn’t know” something.

        Completely different style, I guess.

        Why didn’t he know what was going on?

        Since I haven’t watched this particular exchange, I can only speculate here, but he may or may not have had the specific answers to specific questions at that very moment, or if he did was not cleared to release the details at that moment.

        He may have had pertinent information at that moment, but not the most recent. He may be POTUS, but that doesn’t put him in charge of the dissemination of information. Again, better to defer to those running the show than to speak out of turn and say the wrong thing.

        http://nicedoggie.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/TriggeWarning.png

        False alarm. :em05:

        Again with the speech defect defense. How many times are you going to use that?

        Each and every time you complain about it.

        http://nicedoggie.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/knownknowns.png

        A Known known that we all know? Weird Uncle Joe’s tendency to gaffe.

        Joe Biden isn’t just a gaffe machine. He’s the Lamborghini of gaffes.
        There are longer lists of examples, but I think you get the idea. This IS Joe Biden. We can expect to hear weird stuff to fall out of his mouth from time to time. Again, I see you possess that trait that most Trumpublicans have: a lack of empathy.

        He’s being empathetic by comparing burning CHILDREN to his CORVETTE? Very empathetic. 

        See? A complete lack of empathy. You can’t even conceive it.

        What you already know of Biden is this: either he is completely out of his mind with dementia, and/or he has a speech impediment called ‘stuttering’, that causes him to substitute words for thoughts ending up in some strange-sounding statement.

        So if you KNOW he says stupid shit, but you understand what it is he’s TRYING to say, then you are just being a truculent ass.

        Because ANY child can decipher what it is he was TRYING to say. He was trying to say he has experienced and understands loss himself.

        To expand upon that, I think that he has suffered enough loss that it may have shattered him a bit with the death of his son. Loss can create a lot of false memories as you deal with losing someone close. (crap, don’t get me started on a false memories tangent…)

        But if you are looking for an argument about Biden being ‘too old’, you aren’t going to get much of a one from me. I have this nagging feeling that maybe Joe Biden might find an ‘excuse’ to bow out before the Primaries begin. Nothing concrete, but just this ‘feeling’… watch this space.

        I just saw a video of people in Hawaii, and one man made a very good point. Pearl Harbor is the largest naval and Marine base. Why didn’t they send help? Could it be that no one was awake? Or no one cared? Or his Secretary of the Navy was incompetent?

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBAv3R2qUjo We got to Ukraine quicker than to Maui.

        The wanna-be reporter with a microphone on YouTube.

        So much wrong with this kind of ‘journalism’, and part of it is you not paying close enough attention to it.

        Pay close attention to what the reporter says as he asks his ‘questions’ of these people. He first prefaces the question by describing in his words his own perceptions of what Joe Biden has said, and then asks the person what they think of it.

        But let’s come back to reality for a moment, and consider this:

        Pick ANY catastrophe, during ANY presidential administration, past, present, and future, stick a reporter and a microphone in front of a person who’s just gone through that catastrophe and ask them what they think about their president.

        They are all going to say pretty much the same thing that you see in your video. People NEVER feel the government or the president is ever doing enough.

        Weird, but victims tend to be needy and selfish at that moment. Go figure.

        I see your number of missing has been whittled down to around 300, and even those are probably just people who don’t realize they are on the list. There tends to be a lot of awfulizing that goes on in these events, and you apparently are susceptible to it.

        This is precisely why a POTUS should always “no comment” things like numbers and other fluid details when it comes to commenting off the cuff on major events like this. Whatever he says will be heavily scrutinized by various factions for mistakes or means to attack. “No comment” is just another one of those things to attack, as we can see.

        You are floundering. There are a herd of elephants in the room, and you are going out of your way to find even the most minor, tiddlywink thing to make a stink about just so you don’t have to talk about elephants.

        Amusing.

        http://nicedoggie.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/elephantintheRoom.png

      3. You talk about MY lack of empathy? How about comparing the loss of children to a car- that didn’t burn? How about turning it into something about himself? That’s what he does, because he’s a narcissist.

        Oh, so ONLY 850 people are missing. That makes it so much better.
        You prefer to talk about Trump, rather than answer my questions. Why didn’t Biden or one of his minions or the military help the people in Maui? He is, God help us, Commander-in-Chief of the military and this was something that went on for days. It’s HIS responsibility to order help. You can bet your ass that if wildfires were burning in Delaware, the federal government would be there.
        And what are they doing now to help?
        file:///C:/Users/Owner/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_image001.jpg
        It’s already being called “The Biden Curtain,” as new videos from Lahaina, Maui, reveal miles of black curtains erected to prevent people from seeing what’s happening at the origin site of this month’s catastrophic wildfires in Hawaii.
        “There seems to be a huge emphasis on ensuring that the media and anyone else can’t see what’s going on,” Cygnus reported.
        You also didn’t answer me about how his speech defect him confusing Ukraine with Iraq. YOU prefer to talk about Trump rather than look at Biden’s failures and his corruption. Talking of elephants in the room.
        So stop with the laughing emojis and mocking comments. Because this was a true tragedy, people lost their lives, their children, their homes and have no place to live. And the first thing Corn Pop does is say we’re sending another $380 million to Ukraine. Or is it billion? $78 billion and counting. After all, the Bidens have experience with Ukraine, as Biden BRAGGED when he was VP. And it’s a convenient place to launder Biden money.

      4. Not only do you appear to be completely clueless on the definition of ’empathy’, but you also seem to have a pretty garbled idea of what narcissism is.

        http://nicedoggie.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/TriggeWarning.png

        If you were to need a clinical example of what a narcissist is, it would be Donald J. Trump. The man literally insisted his signature appear on the stimulus checks he sent out, for crying out loud. He can’t NOT be in the news cycle, so he will purposely say and/or do something to stay on top of the news cycle 24/7. It doesn’t matter if the news is positive or negative, as long as people are talking or thinking about him.

        Oh, so ONLY 850 people are missing. 

        Are you daft? It’s not even half that number, and officials can’t even say if they are ‘missing’. As of this morning, roughly 100 of those 388 people have now been tentatively marked as safe.

        The point is that you have been quoting the initial guessing of missing people based solely on the number of tourists and homeless people in and around Maui at the time. There was no concrete number, it was just a GUESS, because nobody had an actual count.

        This happens each and every time there is a disaster, and reporters will always try to pin officials down on a cold, hard figure, and they can’t do it. So they will either guess, or say, “no comment”.

        MARK MY WORDS: We are bound to have some guessing as to the numbers of dead and missing after today’s Category 3 hurricane slamming into Floriduh. The initial numbers will ALWAYS be much higher at first, and will drop off to a much smaller figure in the end.

        Why didn’t Biden or one of his minions or the military help the people in Maui? 

        Why don’t you use your brain for something other than to hold your ears apart?

        What’s the military’s first order of business in a natural disaster?

        TO SAVE ITSELF. The fact that I even have to point something this obvious out to you…

        file:///C:/Users/Owner/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_image001.jpg

        In order to post an image here, you have to first ‘host’ it on a server or website. Then you post the URL here. You can right-click on an image, and copy the image address and post it here. Just know that a lot of websites will not allow you to use their bandwidth to show their images on someone else’s website.

        If you post the URL, and it doesn’t show up as an image here, then I will come in behind you and try to fix it for you. I couldn’t do that here, because you were trying to post an image off of your hard drive.

      5. And you are still ignoring the huge elephant in the room.

        While you are busy pointing out all of Joe Biden’s ‘senior moments’, you constantly ignore the more obvious problems concerning age and fitness of the people you YOUR side of the septic drain field.

        Like Mitch McConnell going blank again.

        http://nicedoggie.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/MitchBlueScreen.png

        I have NO problem pointing out ALL of the old fucks in our government who are drooling all over themselves. One of them being Dianne Feinstein.

        AGE LIMITS. Anyone older than 70 years old need not apply.

  2. Geez! Interesting times indeed. Apparently the boss of the Wagner group – Prigozhin – might have been on a plane that just crashed in Russia. What next?

  3. The real fire in Biden’s house that he referred to in his speech was in 2004. It was a kitchen fire that was put out in 20 minutes.

  4. I tried to stay as far away from the circus in Georgia as I could, until I saw this headline:

    Donald Trump Reveals Being Inside Jail Was ‘Terrible Experience’

    I felt I had to post it, but not for the reason any of you would suspect. To be honest, I didn’t bother reading the article, but I posted the link because it’s what you’re suppose to do when you quote a source. But it is the HEADLINE that caught my interest, and here’s why:

    Change the name of the subject to the following:

    Fester Bestertester Reveals Being Inside Jail Was ‘Terrible Experience’

    My VERY first mental response to a statement like this would be, “WELL, DUH”.

    http://nicedoggie.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/festerBesterTester.png

    No, wait, that isn’t quite right, is it? How about this?

    http://nicedoggie.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/FesterBesterTesterBookingPhoto.png

    Ah, yeah, better.

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