Onyx Lynx

Robert Barnard, mystery writer.

I might believe the part about mixing codeine, alcohol, and iodine, but the gasoline is over the top.

1. Pittsburgh and Cincinnati are contending for the National League Wild Card.  (St. Louis gets the Central Division title.)
2. Tampa Bay and Cleveland are tied for the AL Wild Card.  Texas might still sneak!

So have some human interest stuff (that is, interesting if you study humans.  Less so if you are a human.    Mildly offensive to fans of the restoration of the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs):

• Comrade Misfit notes that Senator Feinstein, who used to be against oversight of the NSA, is now in favor of some, and makes some suggestions toward reform, with a warning:

  The intelligence community is also ignoring history by their repeated assurances that they can be trusted not to abuse their powers. History teaches us that power corrupts, period. Power, both large and small, can be counted on to be abused by the person holding the power. The only way to stop such corruption is to have watchdogs, both inside and outside the government.
  
  The "outside the government" watchdogs are supposed to be our free press. They have fallen down woefully on the job.

• Via Zandar:  the governor of Kentucky champions Obamacare.  (Extensive quote from the New York Times, in case you've used up the 10 articles.)  [ETA:   And maybe someone should talk to neighboring Tennessee...]
• Interesting article at Walk On, referring to an essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates.  Yes, they both need to be read.  Also, see this video of James Baldwin debating William F. Buckley in 1965.

Michael Ward, survivor of the Move (or MOVE) bombing in Philadelphia (alluded to here).

Well, we're still waiting on the Wild Card results, but the division champions are mostly established:  Boston, Detroit, Oakland (AL); Atlanta, Los Angeles (NL).  St. Louis and Pittsburgh will be in the playoffs one way or another, and Cincinnati is one of the four wild card teams. (Tampa Bay, Cleveland, Pittsburgh at the moment, with Texas probably still hoping to sneak in.)

I wonder how much Divisional Championship sweatshirts are going for this year.

With all of this going on it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that what Ted Cruz’s theater is all about is denying people access to affordable private, for-profit health insurance. [Emphasis added]

Southern Beale cuts to the chase.

Driftglass has a simple post:  "Bill Cosby Explains What goes on in the conservative brain when you say 'Obamacare'."

With video audio.

• The True History of Libertarianism in America (NSFWCORP via AlterNet)  I have, I hope, made it crystal-clear that I am not a libertarian.  Right?
• The Dodgers have clinched the NL Western Division title.  The Red Sox are assured a playoff berth, and will probably clinch AL Eastern Division today or tomorrow.  The Orioles and Arizona have moved into the eliminated column.  Tampa Bay, Texas, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati are holding on in Wild Card standings.  The suspense...
• One of the reasons I love Echidne of the Snakes:

  Third, this is absolutely hilarious, given that conservatives reallyreally want to insert probes (transvaginal ultrasound) in women's vaginas as a precondition for getting an abortion, and those probes are not medically required. Women are not supposed to mind that but they *are* supposed to mind a large puppet ogling their birth canals.

...which may have been too modern for them...

• GOP in dwindling demographic niche and why outreach hasn't been working for them.

  Instead of asking “Why don’t more blacks, Latinos, women, etc., join us?”, Republicans should ask “How are we failing to address the concerns of blacks, Latinos, women, etc., so that more of them will want to join us?” That’s a question that Republicans can’t ask, because answering would mean changing their tone and their policies. Republicans can’t do that without having the very same rage they encouraged in their base turned against them.

  Republic of T, of course.
• Someone who tweeted foolish things about women's suffrage and individual freedom being incompatible, probably because assuming "women" not equal to "individual." There are times when I can understand the desire of some women to have as little to do with men as humanly possible.  Noli Irritare Leones.  (With all this misogyny, shouldn't monasteries be thriving?)
• [ETA] Someone ignorant who believes women should homeschool children and not waste time working.  This is one of the reasons I couldn't care less about his stance on drugs.

I've been distracted.

• In the American League:  The Yankees (hee!), the Blue Jays, the Twins, the White Sox, the Angels, the Mariners, and Houston (I'm still not used to that) are looking at an early winter, although there are still Wild Card possibilities.
• In the National League:  Phillies, Mets, Dolphins Marlins, Brewers, Cubs, Padres, Giants, and Rockies are out of contention.  They also have Wild Card possibilities.

(I don't see how making baseball more like hockey improves the sport, but I'm a fuddy duddy and you need to get off my lawn.)

PS  It's Talk Like A Pirate Day, matey.  Shiver your own timbers.

Why we're in trouble:

• Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast on the enmity between (large numbers of) Republicans and (an awful lot of) Americans.
• Yves Smith at naked capitalism features a brief video segment on the failure of Occupy to become a mass political movement.
• Also from Yves Smith:  Banks are above rules.  In certain matters, anyway.
• ETA:  Dave Neiwert at Orcinus on "secessionist" movements and some more America-hating.  A taste, because he's not kidding:

  This is the reaction we've come to know and expect from people on the hardnosed edges of the American right: At the end of the day, they don't really believe in democracy. They don't believe in putting up with other citizens who believe differently, who pray differently, who dress and wear their hair and their clothes differently and eat differently and most of all who think differently from them.
  They like the idea of America as a big all-white nation. They don't like the idea of America as a democracy.
  
  Their antipathy to democracy always creeps out, even in their conspiracy theories (how many times have we heard the far-right refrain, "This is a republic, not a democracy!"), but more importantly in their actions and their political strategies, embodied most recently in the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and the ongoing efforts at voter suppression by conservative Republicans.
  
  And when they realize they are not going to get their way, their solution is not to accept the verdict of democracy. Their solution is to drop out.

It turns out, by the way, that I know someone who voted for Romney. (We all got rather too enthusiastically anti-conservative.)  Oh, well.

Subsidy-glomming reps want to cut food stamps.  Via Republic of T.

The absolutely hilarious part is that some of the biggest recipients of farm subsidies voted to cut food stamps and voted to keep giving subsidies to rich farmers — like themselves. Fourteen Republicans — with a total net worth of $124.5 million, including $7.2 million in farm subsidies — not only voted take food from the mouths of millions of the poor, the working poor, the unemployed, children, the elderly, and the disabled, but voted to continue putting money in their own pockets.
[...]
And these people want to preach to the rest of us about morality?

Leave your body at the door.

• One of the ripples from the Snowden revelations:  Brazil steering away from U.S.-centred Internet.

  While Brazil isn't proposing to bar its citizens from U.S.-based Web services, it wants their data to be stored locally as the nation assumes greater control over Brazilians' Internet use to protect them from NSA snooping.
  
  The danger of mandating that kind of geographic isolation, Meinrath said, is that it could render inoperable popular software applications and services and endanger the Internet's open, interconnected structure.

• How your brain works, or doesn't.

  It turns out that in the public realm, a lack of information isn’t the real problem. The hurdle is how our minds work, no matter how smart we think we are. We want to believe we’re rational, but reason turns out to be the ex post facto way we rationalize what our emotions already want to believe.

It's a dead man's party.

I keep putting off posting that Orcinus is back.

• On Russia's gay-bashing.
• On reasons to support Orcinus' work.
• Fundraising.
• On disagreeing about Ron Paul.
• On "patriot" communities.
• Why Mr. Neiwert is reviving Orcinus.

Straight-up exposure of the fascist octopus attempts at respectability.

Jurassicpork on Boston's farewell to Mariano Rivera.

The relationship of unions and racial equality.  (Not that this is a perfect relationship.)  With graphs.

Yahrzeit.

"110 Stories," by John M. Ford.

God always has enough.

(L'shana tova for those who celebrate.)

Frederik Pohl.

His last and penultimate post.

I used to run into him frequently twenty or so years back.  He will be greatly missed.

You can ignore the truth but the truth won’t ignore you.

--Iori Mochizuki

Via skippy:  5 complaints of the "Christian" Right, and who is really getting hurt.  (Warning:  Amanda Marcotte)

Y'know, I've never been able to sit through Elmer Gantry.

Also, this is a review of the movie about One Direction in which the obvious comparison does not appear, probably because One Direction:  This Is Us would look even worse.  (I was not impressed by One Direction.  One, the abbreviation is one-dimensional.  Two, I get the appeal of young male singers who prance on stage, but does none of them play an instrument?  Three, get off my lawn.)


"It's been a hard day's night..."