jhstoo

@jhstoo.bsky.social

1668 Followers 1565 Following

alt feed for @jhsnyder.bsky.social, bio over there ... "Ofc, there's the Hindenburg" - sadly, the coiner of the phrase seems to have deleted the post. :-(

Picture of Gilly the Guillotine, and Billy the basket ... he catches the heads.
Yet, if God wills that [the Civil War] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
Norman Rockwell's painting "Freedom of Speech", showing an individual in a town meeting rising to make a point.
“Everyone knows what the problem is: The organizations that bring young staffers to Washington, D.C. have spent the last decade prioritizing blind ideological loyalty instead of competence or intelligence,” said a senior GOP congressional staffer, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel issues. “We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.”
A single Iranian drone evaded air defenses and hit the relocated operations center of the US army’s 103rd sustainment command, killing six reservists from Des Moines, Iowa, and wounding dozens more – the first US combat deaths of Operation Epic Fury, the war Donald Trump launched, alongside Israel, against Iran on 28 February. The unit had asked for more medical staff and supplies before the strike and been turned down, according to reporting by the Washington Post and CBS News cited in the letter. There was no doctor on site afterward, no fixed aid station, and only one ambulance, with some of the wounded driving themselves to a hospital in Kuwait City, according to the reports. It took nine days before roughly two dozen soldiers, some still unscreened for brain injuries, were flown to the US military hospital at Landstuhl in Germany. “Doctors told them that because they hadn’t been recorded as medical evacuees on the flight’s manifest or as seriously injured in [the defense department’s] casualty-processing database, they could only get limited treatment and had to wait in nearby barracks because the hospital was unable to admit them,” the letter states. Soldiers later sent to Fort Hood, Texas, are said to have gone weeks without seeing a doctor able to diagnose traumatic brain injury, despite repeatedly failing post-blast cognitive tests, and families have told CBS News the US army downplayed the severity of individual wounds.
White-coat psychologists observing weird-looking patients thru a glass panel. The lead psychologist says "Yes, they're all fools, gentlemen ... but the question remains, 'What kind of fools are they?'"
Around March 2020, there was speculation that China's COVID numbers were deliberately inaccurate, but as of 2021, China's COVID elimination strategy was considered to have been successful and its statistics were considered to be accurate.[7][8][9] By December 2022, the Chinese central government had changed its definition of reported death statistics to only include cases in which COVID-19 directly caused respiratory failure,[10] which led to skepticism by health experts of the government's total death count.[11][12] The same month, the municipal health chief of Qingdao reported "between 490,000 and 530,000" new COVID-19 cases per day.[13] China was part of a small group of countries such as Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore that pursued a zero-COVID strategy.[citation needed] The Chinese government's strategy involved extensive testing, mask wearing, temperature checks, ventilation, contact tracing, quarantines, isolation of infected people, and heavy restrictions in response to local outbreaks. On December 25, 2022, the Chinese government's National Health Commission announced that it would no longer publish daily COVID-19 data.[14] In January 2023, the World Health Organization stated, "We believe that the current numbers being published from China under-represent the true impact of the disease in terms of hospital admissions, in terms of ICU admissions, and particularly in terms of deaths."[15]
Before Trump and during the Biden administration, courts were able to rely on representations made by the Justice Department. Every lawyer for the government understood they owed the courts a duty of candor; everything they said in court must be true to the best of their knowledge and swiftly corrected if they subsequently became aware of additional information. The government obeyed court orders, even the ones it disagreed with. But that’s no longer the case. The presumption of regularity is essentially no more. The presumption is the “‘general working principle’ that means courts will ‘insist on a meaningful evidentiary showing’ before entertaining doubts about the integrity of official acts or documents.” It was commonly used to advance the idea that in the absence of evidence to the contrary, courts should presume government employees, including DOJ lawyers, acted properly in the execution of their duties. Now it’s on life support and Judge Sullivan’s order is another nail in its coffin. This most recent order suggests that Judge Sullivan doesn’t believe the government when it says something is the case, even when that “something” is as simple as the identity of the person in a “to” line in an email. But the government has acted like it has something to hide, even after Congress passed the Transparency Act and Trump signed it into law. So the Judge isn’t accepting what the government has represented to it as truthful, and is requiring documentation to support its claims. Under any other president, the Attorney General would have been disturbed by the suggestion prosecutors couldn’t be trusted. There would be disciplinary review. But here, the acting Attorney General is the defendant in the case. It’s paradigmatic of how far DOJ has fallen.
Beddoes acknowledged that many people hate journalists, but Musk kept going, repeating “they hate you, they hate you,” like an emotionally wounded child. Musk, flailing, tried to come up with some way to attack The Economist specifically. “There are more people that die in Europe from heat deaths than people that die from gun deaths in America. Why aren’t you writing an article about air conditioning?” asked Musk. “Well, we’ve done several on air conditioning, and we had on our cover last week a whole long piece about…” said Beddoes. “Pro-air conditioning?” Musk asked sheepishly. “Very pro-air conditioning,” she responded. “You should read us sometime.” It’s kind of the perfect moment. Musk throws out some meaningless gotcha and then asks why the media isn’t talking about something that he’s become hyperfocused on. In his ignorance, he demonstrates they actually are writing about the thing he cares about. And he just looks like an idiot.
It isn’t just that he has no understanding of policy, nor any knowledge of history to guide him; or that he conforms to none of the norms of custom, morality or law. It is that, even understood as a wholly self-involved, self-serving bundle of id, one whose only motive is self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment, Mr. Trump is incomprehensible. His actions make no sense even <i>in terms of rational self-interest</i>. It’s all just random impulses, fleeting grudges, synaptic burps, based on who spoke to him last, what he saw on TV or what he had for breakfast, for all I know.
colored map of the US showing each state's least favorite state. Note the very last entry: "hates everyone". Stolen from @mattsurelee's Instagram feed.
Fox host Brian Kilmeade dismissed the advice of the network's own senior medical analyst, Dr. Marc Siegle, by saying there is "not a chance" that he will wear a KN95 mask.
Perhaps Wilson’s most egregious racist act as president of the United States was to authorize cabinet members to allow Jim Crow segregation back into federal government departments in Washington DC after they had been integrated during the post-war Reconstruction period. Ironically, however, Wilson’s ascendency to the Presidency relied on Black voters, who traditionally voted for the Republican Party until this time. Many Blacks were persuaded to switch parties by prominent Blacks including W.E.B. Du Bois who believed Wilson’s campaign promises that, if elected, he would aid the Blacks’ cause. In a letter to Bishop Alexander Walters, candidate Wilson stated he wanted to “assure my colored fellow-citizens of my earnest wish to see justice done them in every matter, and not mere grudging justice, but justice executed with liberality and cordial good feeling. Every guarantee of our law, every principle of our Constitution, commands this, and our sympathies should also make it easy.”[2] However, as Du Bois put it, “Wilson was elected but we were disappointed.”[3]
"This is no way to run a foreign policy ... a US president so utterly bereft of strategic thought, so completely incapable of sticking to a plan ..."
Simpson's meme: Best comment of the day ...
Psychologist asks young girl to identify writing on flash cards, gets weird answers, turns to parents, sez "I'm afraid she's a physicist", parents recoil in horror.
My hunch is that the event organizers got spooked by all the cancellations, so they decided to keep the performance schedule quiet. Another possibility is that they are still scrambling to fill performance slots, and they simply don’t have the schedule locked in until the day-of. I cannot decide which possibility is more embarrassing. These are not professionals. They are not qualified to plan a toddler’s birthday party. I cannot imagine being this bad at the nuts-and-bolts of your job, in public, where everyone can see you being see your basic incompetence on full display. Just imagine planning a cross-country trip to attend this fair: It spans two weeks. There is no advance agenda to plan around. So you… pick a weekday at random? You arrive to find empty exhibit halls and overpriced food. I hope you like Glenn Beck, and I hope you happened to show up on Glenn Beck day? The nice thing, I suppose, is that you can get real close to the stage. But that’s because attendance is so low and spread out that you feel basically alone.
A pic with a couple dressed in stars and stripes and a revolutionary war coat.
Jaime Harrison, former chair of the DNC, writes: I say this with no ill will or animosity: if you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination. Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers. Don’t use our infrastructure. Don’t ask Democrats to invest their time, money, and energy in your campaign.
"change my mind" meme, with challenge "Trump is insane".
Cartoon character Fearless Fosdick, with a gaping wound in his abdomen, saluting the Chief and saying "Merely a flesh wound, Chief".
Dubya with the Mission Accomplished banner in the background
Meme graphic: C'mon guy with stick
"Well, did it work for those people?" meme.
... it’s increasingly obvious that Trump was played by pretty much every country in the Middle East—from Israel and Saudi Arabia at the beginning of the war, to the UAE and Qatar and China during it, and at the end by Iran itself. Our second-rate con man encountered first rate-con artists, and, as is often the case, it’s the second rate-con men who turn out to be the biggest suckers.
So where do thigs go from here? Unfortunately, if Fiona Hill’s Brookings paper is any guide, the short-term answer is grim: [quote] Deadlock in Ukraine discredits Russia as a global military force. It corrodes Putin’s patina of indestructibility in the same way that the stalemate in the Persian Gulf undermines the United States and Trump…. So-called “second-rate powers” have diminished the standing of Putin and Trump, the men who started these ill-advised wars. Russia and the United States both have fewer means to exert power and influence than before. Their erstwhile allies—in places like the Caucasus and Central Asia in the case of Russia, and Europe in the case of the United States—are looking beyond them at new regional security options, hastening the development of a more decentralized international order. [/quote] Simply put, the perception of power is in and of itself a form of power. U.S. failures erode the utility of U.S. structural power. The most useful quality of structural power is securing concessions based merely at the possibility of its use. Even if non-compliance is costly for targets, the rest of the world notes the resistance more than the cost-benefit ratio. The more instances in which targets resist, the less efficient the exercise of structural power will be. In other words, both Russia and the United States currently are in ragged strategic shape. And that does not seem to be changing anytime soon.
Norman Rockwell's painting, Freedom of Speech
Norman Rockwell painting Freedom of Speech.
Second, the problems with the Broadview Six case don’t necessarily seem new or confined to Trump II. If line prosecutors, as the transcripts seem to show, are casually violating the grand jury rules by, among other things, talking to grand jurors outside of the grand jury session, personally vouching for the evidence, failing to notify the court of no true bills, and misstating the law, then it suggests that there were problems that pre-existed Trump II and its decimation of the DOJ’s professionalism. I can hear my readers who are criminal defense attorneys crying “D’uh!” in unison.
Randall Monroe's cartoon "dependency", which shows "All Modern Digital Infrastructure" being supported by "A project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003". Context is the NWS screwworm program ended by Elon Musk's child warriors, with the entirely predictable result that the flesh-eating NWS screwworm has now made its way back to Texas cattle ranches. "But we saved so much money, Daddy Elon!"
Captain: What a week, huh? Tintin: Captain, it's Wednesday. Meanwhile, the dog drinks the Captain's beer.
Anywhere between 70 and 96 percent of Russian casualties are now caused by drones. In March, Zelensky said that among Russian forces, “out of 100 percent of losses, 62 percent are killed and 38 percent wounded.” This ratio is astounding; in modern warfare there is usually a killed-to-wounded ratio of between 1-to-3 and 1-to-5. Russian losses nearly invert this ratio due to their unsupported infiltration tactics, the lethality of drones, lack of transportation, poor battlefield medicine, and enormous “gray zone” on either side of the front lines where movement is all but impossible because of the profusion of drones.
AI Overview Two days of the week have musical scales hidden inside their names: Thursday and Saturday.Here is how they break down:Thursday contains the scale Do-Re (or C-D).Saturday contains the scale Do-Re-Ti (or C-B) if spelled backward.Depending on how strictly you look at phonetics, Wednesday also hints at Re (D).
Yonette Joseph‬ ‪@sugarcane99.bsky.social‬: New research sheds light on how mediocre employees, “loyal losers,” help would-be authoritarians maintain power. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/w...
Far Side cartoon: "Donning his new canine decoder, Professor Schwartzman becomes the first human being on Earth to hear what barking dogs are actually saying.
how to fry an egg, by AI. 9 steps, labeled Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, Step 2, Step 3, Step 4, Step 5, Step 4, Step 5. The individual graphics are hard to describe, as they make no sense.
Killer rabbit scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "Run away, run away!"
Google search, when I typed "ignore" into the search bar: "Got it! Let me know if you change your mind and need help with anything else."
Mark Jacob‬ ‪@markjacob.bsky.social‬· 25m The New York Times’ euphemism desk has worked to obscure Trump’s march to a dictatorship. This thread offers some examples. / “Trump appears focused on expanding the nation’s footprint” (Jan. 2025) (Describing Trump's threats to seize Greenland & Panama Canal and his call to annex Canada)
Children's Golden Book, titled "Oh, Christ, it's THIS ASSHOLE AGAIN". Also: 29¢, which I like to imagine is what it costs to buy this twit.
Spanish amateur painter's botched restoration attempt of a painting of Jesus
The Russian solution to EVERYTHING: invade Europe! [quote] Pro-Kremlin political commentator Sergei Markov wrote that he woke up to the sound of explosions over the weekend as air defenses fired on the attacking drones. He blamed Kyiv’s allies for helping Ukraine boost its drone output, alleging “it was Europe that tried to hit Moscow.” “As long as Europe believes it’s safe, such attempts will continue,” Markov said. Russian hawks long have urged the Kremlin to respond to the growing Ukrainian attacks by striking Kyiv’s allies in Europe. [/quote] Last month, the Defense Ministry published a list of factories in Europe that it said were involved in producing drones and their components for Ukraine. It warned that attacks on Russia involving drones manufactured in Europe are fraught with “unpredictable consequences.” Asked Sunday by a state TV commentator why Moscow tolerates being “bitten” like that, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded that its nuclear deterrent is intended to fend off threats to Russia’s existence.
Lawless, racist Republicans are coming at us in waves, and they need to be met where they are, and stopped cold by any means possible. Let me be precise about this: Republicans mean to end us RIGHT NOW. They have proven they will do anything to render our elections meaningless, and have a corrupt, radical-Right Supreme Court which is blessing this anti-America attack on our freedoms with their bloody stamp of approval. Republicans have the Executive, the House, the Senate and the Court, if you think they are going to let a little thing like the will of the people get in their way, you haven’t been paying attention. I have written fairly extensively about my new neighbors to the north in Virginia, where Abigail Spanberger blew out her Republican challenger in November to ascend to the governorship of that commonwealth.
XKCD 'toon: Awake, Sheeple! In which an anti-government protester unwittingly calls the sheeple to awake from their 10 thousand year slumber ... and they do!
George Sievers writes: OTOH, I'm still cross at having my human rights violated based on trash computer models & big pharma-aligned orgs pushing medical interventions on those least at risk. So ...
Anywhere between 70 and 96 percent of Russian casualties are now caused by drones. In March, Zelensky said that among Russian forces, “out of 100 percent of losses, 62 percent are killed and 38 percent wounded.” This ratio is astounding; in modern warfare there is usually a killed-to-wounded ratio of between 1-to-3 and 1-to-5. Russian losses nearly invert this ratio due to their unsupported infiltration tactics, the lethality of drones, lack of transportation, poor battlefield medicine, and enormous “gray zone” on either side of the front lines where movement is all but impossible because of the profusion of drones. The current rate of about 1000 total Russian casualties per day (based on Ukrainian estimates) translates to 620 dead per day, 18,600 per month, and 226,300 per year. If Ukraine can achieve their goal of 50,000 Russian casualties per month, that translates to 372,000 Russians killed in action per year. Reaching that goal is predicated on boosting drone production to 10 million FPVs per year.
"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity."
Beyond this specific issue, anti-democratic movements have an inherent distrust of expertise, of anyone who knows what they are talking about. Experts can’t be trusted, because they might think independently. In her classic book The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt wrote that [quote] Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty. [/quote] The Trump administration isn’t a full-on totalitarian regime, at least not yet, but its instincts obviously run in that direction. The degradation of the federal government’s competence, the gutting of American science, and the epically bad judgment that led to Operation Epic Fury are all part of the same story.
"The inmates have taken over the asylum" (or "the lunatics are running the asylum") is an idiom describing a chaotic situation where unqualified, irresponsible, or irrational people are in control, rather than those who are meant to be in charge. It implies a total breakdown of order, role reversal, and poor management.Key Takeaways and Usage:Meaning: An organization, project, or group is being run by the wrong people—usually those who lack the skills or stability to manage it, leading to inevitable chaos.Origins: Often attributed to film producer Richard A. Rowland in 1919 regarding actors taking control of film production.Context: It is commonly used in business or organizational contexts to suggest that authority has been handed to those who should be supervised, rather than those who are capable of leading.
Kobe writes: 6% of scientists are Republicans. Scientists have no explanation for why that number is so high."
The propaganda organs of the state — which Mao had carefully cultivated and made part of his publicity apparatus — outdid themselves with reports of Mao’s swimming prowess. According to the People’s Daily, Mao covered nine miles in just over an hour. If that seems like a lot…read on. In the China Media Project, David Bandurski took a deep dive (sorry) into Mao’s swimming accomplishments, partially translating a paper by graduate student Luō Xiǎoyuè 罗晓月 that evaluate the claims. Luo found Mao swam twice as fast, if the time and distance were recorded correctly, than China’s Olympic champion Sūn Yáng 孙杨, who won a gold medal at the 2012 Olympics. At the 2011 World Championships, Sun’s world record 1500m swim was done at an average speed of 1.7 meters/second, far short of Mao’s 3.8 meters/second. Critics at the time seized on the impossibility of the feat to ridicule China’s propaganda, but defenders cried foul: the outside observers had missed the point. The Yangtze’s strong current — Mao was swimming downstream — led to the superhuman statistics. The point had never been to imply that he was superhuman, or part fish, or ideologically pure, or possessed some other trait that induced natatorial heroics. Luo Xiaoyue decided to put this to the test. He assumed that Mao entered the river where the current was the strongest, and took into account that the river is often at its highest volume in July and August, and calculated that the current would have been about 2 meters/second. Run the numbers and we find that even taking into account the current, Mao is still supposed to have swum at an average rate of 1.8 meters/second: faster than the 2012 Olympic champion’s world record 1500m. And Mao did this over 15 kilometers: 10 times farther than Sun Yang swam.
Mike Rogers, a Republican running for the U.S. Senate in Michigan, has faced scrutiny for living in a $1.7 million Cape Coral, Florida mansion for years before launching his campaign in 2023. Critics have questioned his residency, noting he had a Florida homestead tax exemption and received a traffic ticket there in January 2024, though his campaign states he has moved back to Michigan. Key details regarding Mike Rogers and Florida include: Residency Dispute: Rogers was accused of being a "carpetbagger," having lived in Florida for nearly a decade after leaving Congress. Florida Property: He owns a 4,751-square-foot, $1.7 million home in Cape Coral, which was his official residence and received a $50,000 homestead tax exemption in 2022. Voting Records: Rogers was registered to vote in Florida before transferring his registration to Michigan in August 2023, with his Florida registration cancelled in early 2024. Campaigning/Traffic Ticket: He faced criticism for campaigning and doing media interviews from his Florida home in late 2025, and public records showed he received a traffic citation in Lee County, Florida, in January 2024. Current Situation: Rogers’ campaign stated he moved back to Michigan, staying with family in Genoa Township while constructing a new home, following the demolition of a previous structure, according to the Michigan Advance and Bridge Michigan.
Guy with red MAGA baseball cap filling his gas tank, looking at the $ on the gas pump, and going into sticker shock.
Ounka on Xitter posts a video clip of Trump speaking on 1 May 2026 at The Villages, and summarizes the point as: "Trump says Democrats are committing treason by criticizing his war. Treason used to mean betraying your country to an enemy. Now it means hurting Trump's feelings"
Jamelle Bouie, posting to bluesky on 1 May 2026: "I genuinely wish the democratic national committee was as powerful, organized, and ruthless as a lot of people seem to think it is."
The order is intended to help more people gain access to retirement plans before next year, when the federal government will start matching retirement contributions made by lower-income workers. That new matching contribution, known as the Saver’s Match, comes from 2022 legislation passed under Democratic President Joe Biden. Starting in January, it will offer a match of up to $1,000 for workers who make less than $35,000 a year.
Golden statue of Trump - erected by Trump, of course - at his Doral Golf Course.
On 25 Dec 2022 Rod Hilton posted to Mastodon: He talked about electric cars. I don't know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius. Then he talked about rockets. I don't know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius. Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I've ever heard anyone say, so when people say he's a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets. Dec 25, 2022, 12:32 AM
Trump’s criticism of Prince Harry is not new. In recent weeks, he has dismissed the duke’s public comments on international issues, suggesting that Harry does not represent the views of the United Kingdom. The remarks followed Harry’s appearance abroad, where he spoke about global conflicts and urged stronger international engagement. “I think I am speaking for the U.K. more than Prince Harry,” Trump said at the time, signaling a sharp divergence in perspective.
Calvin&Hobbes playing Calvinball.