Catholic for & despite my failings/
So many kids/
Married despite my failings/
Tired/
Lawyer/
Clever bit/
(I, the only guy who counts/Me, a name I call myself)
This tweet, the start of a thread of sadly characteristic length, will be my pinned tweet through November 2024 and let's be honest, beyond.
I am not voting for Donald Trump or Joe Biden. They are both awful men and you can't make me.
I'll explain why.
One of the reasons I used to do free self-defense classes for women is that -- a growing problem in my youth and a real and very large one now -- video and popular fiction have given girls the idea they have a chance toe-to-toe with a full-grown and angry man.
They don't. This nice young woman is apparently a fourth dan in tae kwon do, which makes her a master. She is therefore proficient in a number of melee weapons, can probably do tornado/hurricane round- and spin-kicks to make your jaw drop, etc.
She also appears to be approximately 92 pounds soaking wet. She will be able to deliver a number of fast kicks to the head that most men will shake off as they close if they don't just keep their hands up as they charge.
If you don't carry, and you are a woman, even one who thinks she's a man, your goal in any violent encounter with a man is not to beat him. It is to render him incapable of or unwilling to follow and harm you.
Men protect their necks, chests, and groins. Hitting them in the arms is famously unproductive. Aim for spots he can't or won't protect, like just below the kneecap, and try to make it so he pees blood (kidney strikes are good) or the equivalent.
If her sunbaenim was any good, he taught her some basic self-defense techniques -- grappling, throwing, spinning, etc. -- as a way to temporarily stun a male opponent either (unlikely) press and win or (more likely) run and discourage pursuit.
@sabrdance
A someone who has been stabbed more than once, I am here to tell you that all of this is entirely true. Every single time it happened, (1) I wasn't trying to be in a fight let alone a knife one and (2) I took my own damned advice because I wanted to live.
@juliettekayyem
Yo, Harvard prof, out of curiosity, how do you "move the trucks" when you slash the tires and empty the gas tanks of trucks then on a bridge? Do you think the trucks' emergency rotors deploy and they peacefully return to their sleeping berths? No points for saying "tow trucks."
Remember: "Never again," when put to the test in most of the West, means, "Never again will we allow Nazi Germany to murder millions of Jews in Europe between 1933 and 1945."
@MikaelThalen
You seem like a fellow capable of stringing words together in loosely coherent sentences, so did it not occur to you that it's odd that a group of nominal far-right-wingers would turn the cameras "off" but leave the masks on?
@juliettekayyem
Wait! I know! You can activate AAA's Emergency Strike Force and have them mass-deploy their elite teams to change the tires and refill the tanks in ... the middle of a giant traffic jam ... on a bridge ... and then presumably get their rapid-response CDL drivers to help.
NEW: hearing
@WinsomeSears
referred to
@pwcdanica
on the
@VASenate
floor as "sir."
Chamber has gone into recess twice after reportedly "Sears refused to apologize."
"I'm not here to upset anyone, I'm here to do the job the ppl of VA have called me to do."
#VALeg
@GrabbyHayes
I punched at her. She gripped my arm and shoulder as directed. I waited. She looked at me. I realized she was trying and said, "Oh, shoot, sorry," and flipped myself onto the mat. She laughed (BUT SHE ALREADY HAD A BOYFRIEND DANGIT).
@GrabbyHayes
When I was a young man, and part of what drove this, was when I was first learning karate, the master did a self-defense class as a break. I got paired up with a pretty redhead and I was supposed to punch at her, she grips me, spins me, puts me on the floor.
I know the My Norms crowd is busy following all of the latest twists and turns in The Walls Are Closing In: 2022 Edition, but this rapidly-accelerating "my fellow citizens are my enemies" rhetoric from Democratic party leaders is a definable and very real threat.
@GrabbyHayes
I was 5'10" and maybe 155 pounds at that point.
When it got to her turn, she was even more surprised because I'd catch her arm, grip, flip, and catch and lower her to the ground.
I'm not impressive. I just realized the scale of the difference.
As someone over the age of 45 who has actually paid attention to the news since the age of 4 or so, let me fill in some gaps for people who had better things to do with their time or were born after Clinton's inauguration.
In public, Biden likes to whisper to make a point. In private, he's prone to yelling. The president's admonitions include: "God dammit, how the f**k don't you know this?!," "Don't f**king bullsh*t me!" and "Get the f**k out of here!" via
@AlexThomp
I'm still tickled at the crazy lady who somehow missed the part of Texas History where we learned how Sam Houston overwhelmed a numerically superior force by waiting until the latter had decided to take a nap without posting sentries who could stay awake.
But: Wanna add a bit.
Six years later, I'm still floored by the number of practicing trial lawyers I used to follow who watched the Blasey-Ford woman's testimony, said, "Wow, she seems credible," and then concluded she was therefore telling the absolute truth.
So, being a lawyer, I went back and Read the Rule and also looked at the actual form. I'm a bit puzzled by the reporting here, or would be except it's Politico.
Let's begin with the form.
Like "don't target noncombatants" and "don't use rape as a weapon of war" and "don't massacre children" and "don't engage in torture as a means of execution" and "make sure armed combatants wear uniforms to mark them out from combatants" and
@scotthar_tx
Dude with a proportionally-weighted stick is gonna do some damage.
She's not.
(I used to spin a bo staff that quickly as a young man. I definitely couldn't now.)
@MikaelThalen
I mean, these are "far right" young men in the prime of their lives and apparent good health who are either wearing the masks because of internally-adopted COVID protocols(!) or to disguise their faces, and yet only adjust those masks, if they touch them at all, in "private."
Antonin Scalia got so badly beaten by Ruth Bader Ginsburg that the approach to statutory and constitutional interpretation he basically singlehandedly championed on the Court for years became the de facto method to which everyone responded and continues to respond.
The biopic cemented her legacy
Her (kinda over hyped) relationship with Antonin Scalia & her non-traditional marraige humanized her:
She was friends w/ a con (but thrashed/beat him legally) and was married w/ kids but never cooked
A KEY storytelling thing Cons never get
3/4
"Siri, show me what happens when the people with the lowest admission criteria to college seek jobs that prioritize benefits, job security, and a truncated work year over salary."
@LizBoldonMN
"Sweetheart, raising you was so hard I hoped no one else would ever go through it, and for that matter, I'd never go through it again. How was school?"
Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., has been an atrocious human being, in public and private, for decades. He deserves much of what he's experiencing as the just desserts of a lifetime of ambition and corruption.
We pity him for our souls' sakes, not for his.
I see people express pity for Biden—as though he is an old man being used by others.
While we should pity all who have chosen a path of ultimate destruction, Biden is not a victim of others.
His entire life has been defined by his pursuit of power. He finally got the presidency
It remains an enduring mystery to me that men and women my age could vote for this clown or his clown predecessor, when the news of their many, many clownish foibles were front-and-center for decades, literally decades, and then feign surprise at those same failings.
Kemp
* ended lockdown faster than anyone
* got pilloried by Trump for it
* got pilloried by Stacey Abrams for it
* went to war with the mayor of Atlanta over it (and won)
* rode the wave of popularity he enjoyed of that/good governance to re-election over Abrams and Trump's proxy
FWIW, "fetal heartbeat" is a misnomer. The ultrasound picks up electrical activity generated by an embryo. The so-called "heartbeat" sound you hear is created by the ultrasound. Not until 10 weeks can the opening and closing of cardiac valves be detected by a Doppler machine. ...
I can't believe I'm saying this, but I actually miss the 1980s political press. Partisan Democrats almost to a one, they spent so much time roasting this moron, you'd think they were serving up his haunches as part of a buffet.
Reading the transcript of Hur's interview of Biden (on top of breaking news since the summer of 2002!), I'm struck not just by the weirdness and meandering confusion, but by the fact that every major gaffe comes as Biden tries to Biden his way into not answering questions.
Joe Biden once tried to get into a fight with, and, lying through his teeth about his academic credentials, got in a shouting match *with a potential primary voter in front of other potential primary voters and the cameras*.
Lots of cameras.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is part of the executive branch. Pretending otherwise is nonsense. The president is responsible for its actions. Giving the veneer of independence allows the president to not be responsible for his subordinates. That is bad.
DeSantis's answer to Fox on why he'd fire Chris Wray = great example of how a norm fades away.
D presidents grudgingly pick GOP FBI directors. Trump fires Comey, huge scandal, Mueller probe.
DeSantis saying outright that the FBI is not "independent," president can reshape it.
This is your daily reminder that Barack Obama, whom some lauded as a one-of-a-kind talent while ascending to the presidency, is the sort of mediocre thinker who can't understand the necessity of separating these two tragedies by even as much as a tweet.
As we grieve the children of Uvalde today, we should take time to recognize that two years have passed since the murder of George Floyd under the knee of a police officer. His killing stays with us all to this day, especially those who loved him.
Far and away one of the dumbest cultural trends of the last fifty years has been the proclivity of music critics to sneer at this man and his oeuvre because he created for popular film and not for tiny live audiences in New York.
The American university system is essentially a sewer that hoovers up money from the federal government and nurtures diseases until they burst into the wider world.
But as written, this is worse than nonsense: It skims along the edge of libel while taking advantage of the fact that somewhere between half and 90 percent of its readers wouldn't know why it's BS on stilts.
@YesThatVCharles
Yeah, this is color guard without a flag. It's pretty cool! And it's useless against a dude with a big stick or a willingness to bleed a bit on the way to close.
In the aftermath of that same, failed bid for the presidency, his campaign staff wanted everyone with a notepad to know that he'd flown into a rage when caught giving a speech by a British politician as if it was his own, demanding his speechwriters claim they'd tricked him.
Heck, the moron used to ruefully comment to anyone who would listen on his "Irish temper," though weirdly he never mentioned his "Irish stupidity" or "Irish serial dishonesty."
In the aftermath of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, former staffers complained that Biden accused them, loudly, of failing to prepare him for his moment in the sun, after he'd locked himself in his office and wrote his line of questioning on his own.
Riffing on this and the poor Zoomer girl video from earlier: I sometimes like to talk at length about how being a father of twelve, married for over 20 years, goes because Twitter tends to reward IT'S ALL PEACHES AND CREAM and THEY'VE TAKEN THE FINAL KEEP FALL BACK FALL BACK.
@AviWoolf
Depends. We stayed in a short-term rental for almost two months while I prepped for and took the bar. We stayed in another for two months until I got a job. We lived in a small house in deep rural for about nine months. It had water and electricity.
He *lied*. He lied repeatedly; he lied stupidly; he lied transparently; he lied, admitted it, and kept lying about new topics, basking in adulation for it. In no universe with which I'm familiar is "in good faith" compatible with "repeated lying."
Wait sorry. I'm Christian. nm
So forgive me for not thinking Fauci is some sort of American villain. I think he operated in good faith, doing his best to grapple with a novel disease. When it comes to political decisions, however, the buck stops with politicians. They’re responsible for the choices they made.
Our pizza stone of 18 years, which has served us faithfully through so many frozen pizzas and reheats of restaurant pizza, passed away in its rest last night. Please keep our family in your thoughts during this difficult time.
@Sardaukar1337
I don't think "women" fit this, I think a subset of women with no particular exposure to how men think fit this to a T.
My wife knows the drumbeat: "I don't play games to talk to people, I play games as a deliberate alternative to talking to people."
After that wonderful New Republic article about Biden wanting to break the impasse with Iran by sending them exactly as much money as we had frozen in response to their sponsorship of terrorism, Biden spent hours yelling at his staff to find the leak, who turned out to have quit.
@ErinStuvek
FWIW, my daughters have taken our twelve as a useful starting spot.
When I tell them not many guys will go for that many kids, they say, "Mom worked you up from four," hug me, and walk away.
It is unreal, the extent to which *universally accepted norms of conduct* are suspended, unfavorably, whenever some people talk about Israel.
"You killed people while rescuing hostages!" Yes, this is why civilized peoples don't take hostages.
Remember, Hamas could have just... released hostages in exchange for nothing. Because... YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO HOLD HOSTAGES.
In tort law, the saying is "danger invites rescue".
I try very hard to give people the benefit of the doubt, but David French has been a lawyer too long. His answer to every bad thing is, ultimately, "that's why we have courts." This is profoundly anti-republican and anti-democratic on top of being detached from reality.
I know I'm a broken record, but it is brutally incumbent on every state that actually observes the laws of war to suspend them and beat the snot out of those who don't to teach the rogues the consequences of departing from that law.
...after Biden had yelled at that same staffer, days after the fact, for not backing his play in front of the rest of the staff, and suggesting that staffer quit.
@arneduncan
I've been wondering something and I think you're the guy to answer it. Do they actually fit all thirty or whatever of you in that tiny car, or is there a hidden trap door underneath? Seems like the latter but man I've seen some great work.
Anyway, thanks in advance.
Good thing we don't have as chief executive a blustering moron who has been wrong about every major thing in which he's had any say at all for his entire adult life
BREAKING: President Biden said the risk of nuclear “Armageddon” is at its highest level since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, as Russian officials speak of the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons after suffering massive setbacks in Ukraine.
A group of five to six kids just starting doing donuts and creating skid marks on the Pride Mural. Right in front of me as we’re reporting on three people getting arrested for doing the same thing last night.
@KHQLocalNews
The idea that women naturally have a better grip on their anger because society treats them like garbage and they therefore have to hold back constantly is the sort of thing upper middle class white women tell themselves while scream-singing Alanis Morissette songs.
When the Texans attacked at San Jacinto, they yelled, "Remember the Alamo!" and "Remember Goliad!" They weren't rallying themselves by remembering defeats. They were remembering real war crimes.
"Woe betide Israel if it fails to scrupulously obey the laws of war to which it has pledged itself and which it has largely obeyed when fighting against an actor that rejects literally every single law of war."
Wahhabi revolutionaries smashed grave markers in Mecca and its surrounding environs. Henry VIII only crossed his last bridge when he exhumed Thomas Becket's corpse and hanged it for treason. The icons in Hagia Sophia were covered in offal and set aflame.
It's all of a piece.
Reading the transcript of Hur's interview of Biden (on top of breaking news since the summer of 2002!), I'm struck not just by the weirdness and meandering confusion, but by the fact that every major gaffe comes as Biden tries to Biden his way into not answering questions.
I say again: Whatever your criticisms of Murder Mitch McConnell, that man kept this hack off the Supreme Court and gave us three, count them, three far better Justices. Mind your manners when you speak of that hero.
For those of you who don't speak Moron natively, allow me to translate:
"Our efforts to smear Clarence Thomas using his wife as a proxy have, so far, been largely unsuccessful. It is therefore my hope that fellow Morons will pivot to Samuel Alito, through a similar vector."
Hoping this story leads to wider recognition that Martha-Ann Alito is every bit as much a fringe MAGA extremist as Ginni Thomas—but probably has more influence on her husband than Ginni does on Clarence.
For decades, Democrats predicted that unrestricted immigration would turn Florida, Arizona, and the big prize -- Texas -- blue. They were wild about it for that reason until the RGV started going red and the actual problems showed up on their doorsteps.
Let them eat cake.
An UNPRECEDENTED declaration: “I’m gonna tell you something NYers,never in my life have I had a problem that I didn’t see an ending to. I don’t see an ending to this. This issue will destroy NYC. Destroy NYC.”
This is the first weird thing: He rather explicitly identifies what the entity is and does on the very first page, but the Politico report and its preferred mouthpieces suggest he's hiding exactly that.
I do not have great thoughts on gun control or school security. I tend to think we have allowed real, actual evil to take root in our society, and the Devil loves a good, open playground; the tools are the human beings, not their implements.
For the life of me, I do not and have not understood since I was at least 16 the cultural adoration we give teachers. It's gotten worse as I've become a parent and put wave after wave of kids through various schools. Is this some misplaced mass-cultural maternal affection?
Public school teachers' rights to teach children are derived entirely from the consent of their parents to that instruction. This, as with all of our self-governance, should not even remotely be at issue, left or right; if their rights and ours conflict, we win.
Today, now, Yellen needs to find these leaks and brutally crush them. The IRS stood for decades on the principle that these things aren't public information, for very good reason, and now it's like an open faucet. This is terrible for a system that relies on voluntary compliance.
NEW: We have something unprecedented. Yes, people use that word too much. It’s valid in this case.
You have to tell the IRS all your stock sales in the past year. We have the wealthiest Americans’ taxes. So we have their stock trades.
Here’s our story:
He got so completely owned by the woman who got her own Barbie doll that he created the framework for thirty-five years(!) and counting of judicial work, and she created the framework for Amy Coney Barrett to become the vote that killed Roe.
Let me save you a click. It is well-established that public school teachers enjoy significantly fewer rights to speak freely as public school teachers than university professors do. You have to get over halfway down to see French passingly admit this.
Still trying to puzzle out how we are so concerned about the rights of government employees to act in their own discretion in potential violation of the rights of the people whom they are theoretically serving.
I too love rigorous science with invisible axes of indeterminate units, without any context about why Europe counts against, say, Asia. (Good news, the Democrats are centrists in China!)
Those of you too young/too pro-abortion/too indifferent for the parallel: This is what pro-lifers went through with Democrats for about three decades until they'd basically been purged. It's all well and good to have a principle of some importance until a national ticket calls.
Put aside that no law of war, ever, has declared that attacking a sleeping enemy is a war crime. Put aside that the Spanish, from whom the cultural nap imperative arises, fielded amazingly competent land armies who -- unlike the successor Mexican army -- posted sentries.
But if we're going to laughably describe an attack on an idiot and his half-savage force who couldn't bother to post meaningful sentries while they dallied with the camp followers as a war crime; well, folks, then it was a war crime that ended a war of atrocities.
The notion that we are locked into underwriting an educational system that employs people who hate the United States, Jews, Christians, and many others, and works to make that hate societal, merely because we funded them before they became insane, is itself madness.
"We celebrate the fact that our kids were murdered as that made us the fathers we are today" doesn't mean the same in everyday English as it does in journalism-major speak.
It's actually extraordinarily easy to understand. Joe Biden is intensely clannish and nasty; those who harm his clan are his enemies. The woman his son knocked up who didn't have the good grace to kill her kid, and the kid, harmed Hunter, and are therefore his enemies.
Olive Garden brought tasty, hot, reasonably-priced and reasonably nutritious Italian cuisine to millions of Americans otherwise putting Ragu on store brand pasta and calling it a night.
Snooty Millennials standing on the shoulders of giants and boasting about their own height.
Olive Garden serves as a living reminder of how bad all American food was in the 90s until millennial hipsters upgraded everything to above European standards
25 years ago, I told the woman who would ultimately be my wife but there was no way that the American left would get to the point of actually excusing or celebrating child rape. We did not have the expression "sweet summer child," but she said as much in fewer words.
It's very hard to overstate the extent to which Antonio López de Santa Anna was one of the most successful, vicious incompetents of all time, and one who, if God is just, is currently experiencing the unpleasant end of Asmodeus's pain stick.
The crazy woman echoes a bit of nonsense that was all the rage when I was in college, which means it will leak out into the wild and become normalized in newsrooms if it hasn't already, to-wit: Beating up sleeping combatants is a war crime, especially if midday naps are cultural.
So, simply, *there was no counterparty to disclose.* Had Gorsuch listed Greenberg Traurig's CEO or managing partner or however they have it set up as the counterparty, *he would have been lying under oath*.
So for the final chapter in my book I've been reading a lot about technological progress and the future of humanity. And I came across Paul Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb". And holy shit, how profoundly evil is it to think that The Problem is that too many humans exist.
Joe Biden is an idiot who's always thought he's smarter than everyone else in the room, so this is par for the course, but when falling back on a well-worn habit to prove it, he managed to demonstrate both that he's senile and that he's a lying idiot both.
Joe Biden is a congenital liar, a corrupt egomaniac, and an adulterer. He put power over family and earned a bitter fruit for it. He is not a good man.
You were always a clown, but it's ok to take off the makeup sometimes.
“I’ll still vote for the sleepy guy who just needs a cough drop, you fascist!” This is so stupid. No one’s mad at Biden for being tired or having a cold. He’s a good man and no one cares that he’s coughing. We’re mad at him for running when he can’t serve another four years and
Only in Italy, Ukraine, and Mexico could such a brutal incompetent rise to supreme power and not just keep it, but on losing it, return and have it again and again; but it was his great luck to be born in and have his power base in one of the great failed states of all time.