Matt Taibbi has the answer for how to watch election returns tonight.
No matter where you watch, coverage tonight should be packed with lunatic hyperbole, with warnings either about a blood-soaked New American Reich or a vast election-theft conspiracy, depending on which party succeeds. Of course the most likely end is the Beastie Boys No Sleep Till Brooklyn scenario, i.e. we don’t make it to an answer no matter how late we stay up, with panic continuing for weeks and people on all sides feeling more anxious and hating one another more as time progresses.
To which our answer is, Drink! But have fun doing it, at least tonight, perhaps according to these rules:
Drink EVERY TIME:
Anyone, from a candidate to a TV anchor, mentions that “democracy is on the ballot.” Double-shot for use of the phrase democracy itself, e,g, “democracy itself is on the ballot.”
You’re told this is the most important election of our lifetime, or the most critical moment of our lives, etc. You may drink an additional shot if you’re certain today is not any of those things.
Steve Kornacki draws a frenzied geometric shape around Pennsylvania.
John Fetterman’s shorts are visible in a video report.
Nate Silver reminds you he doesn’t do predictions, but rather publishes percentage-chance forecasts.
Liz Cheney is mentioned (i.e. as if mattering).
Elon Musk is blamed for something. Double-shot if the bad thing is “in the name of” or “under the guise of” free speech.
Anyone mentions “over a hundred election deniers on the ballot.” Also drink for permutations on the theme, e.g. “60% of Americans will have an election-denier on the ballot,” or “Over half of GOP candidates are election-deniers,” “election-denier JD Vance wants to ban books,” etc.
Anyone mentions the “specter of violence” or “conditions ripe for violence,” or reports votes are being counted “amid threats of violence.” Do an exclamation shot at the end of the night if no violence is ultimately observed.
A politician or a pundit warns that everything might come down to the “wild card” in Georgia, and with suspicious gleefulness reminds you we might all be waiting until December 6th to find out who’ll control the Senate. Call it the “No Sleep Till Georgia” rule. Read the rest of this entry »
At the First Battle of Bull Run, General Jackson turned the tide of battle by having his brigade deliver a downhill charge with fixed bayonets that shattered the Union advance. “And, When you charge,” Jackson ordered his men: “yell like Furies!”
Smithsonian has an interesting video of a Confederate Reunion at which a number of very old men perform the famous Rebel Yell.
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You might well think that the famous Rebel Yell is long extinct, but you’d be wrong.
Fox hunters traditionally signal viewing the fox with a cry of “Tally-ho!.” But in Old Virginia, the aboriginal element responds to the appearance of the fox (or the rabbit in the case of beagle or basset footpacks), not with a “Tally ho!. but with the old-time Rebel Yell.
Getting involved with the Old Dominion Hounds and fox hunting in Fauquier County, I inevitably became acquainted with the renowned 80-odd-year-old retired huntsman Melvin Poe.
Fox hunting is just another of the Field Sports and it is really a natural extension of the better known kinds of hunting and fishing. Melvin and I immediately recognized each other as the sorts of hunting and fishing keen rural rednecks that my disapproving female relatives would refer to as “woodrats.”
If I ran into Melvin at an Old Dominion meet, he and I would often car follow the hunt in my SUV. Melvin knew the Old Dominion country like the back of his hand. He’d hunted it for many decades. And Melvin had about as many inhibitions about entering and crossing posted private ground as I did when I was 17.
Following a hunt with Melvin as guide was sure to have us finding foxes before the pack ever showed up. One day, Melvin posted us along a small stream, and sure enough! a small parade of foxes began vacating the area along the far bank with no sign or sound of hounds or horn nearby. Melvin drew himself up and commenced saluting those foxes with loud Rebel Yells. I stood there admiring all this, but soon found myself fixed with Melvin’s imperative eye. I had no choice. I found myself there, in the Virginia woods, doing my best to deliver the traditional Rebel Yell like a good Confederate. Needless to say, the huntsman Gerald and the mounted field heard our commotion and after an interval arrived to pick up the scent.
Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason, and plot;
There is no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!
Early in the morning of November 5, Guy Fawkes crept, torch in hand, into the cellar beneath the House of Lords in the Palace of Westminster. In that cellar, he and his fellow conspirators had previously placed a cache of 1800 pounds ((36 barrels, or 800 kg) of gunpowder. Just as he was about to ignite the barrels, blowing himself and the House of Lords to Kingdom Come, the torch was snatched from his hand by a man named Peter Heywood.
Fawkes was arrested and taken before the privy council where he remained defiant. When asked by one of the Scottish lords what he had intended to do with so much gunpowder, Fawkes answered him, “To blow you Scotch beggars back to your own native mountains!”
So went the attempted Gunpowder Plot of 1605.
The intention of the plotters was to use the explosion, timed to coincide with the opening of Parliament, to kill King James I and eliminate much of the ruling Protestant aristocracy. They also intended to kidnap the royal children, then raise the standard of revolt in the Midlands with the object of restoring the freedom to practice Catholicism in England.
Vanderleun‘s boyhood had a good deal in common with mine, despite being set in California.
Sometime later my parents bought a house on the edge of Butte Canyon out on the fringes of Paradise. My father built a new bedroom for Tom and myself at the back of the house with its own entrance stairs that incorporated the trunk of a black walnut tree. There was a cherry tree in the backyard along with a brick barbecue. Beyond the backyard was an acre of wild oak, madrone, and manzanita. Behind that was an old dirt road that ran right at the edge of Butte Canyon. The canyon here was draped everywhere by frozen flows of black lava in all shapes and often precipitous drops. Nearby there were trails branching out and down into the canyon. On weekends and in the summer, our parent’s instructions to us were simple: “Home before dark.”
I was 9 and my brother 7 and we set off every summer and non-school morning with a couple of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to explore this strange landscape of lava beds, High Sierra forests, and streams, and abandoned gold mines.
For there were abandoned gold mines everywhere in the sloping walls of Butte canyon. You found them by following old almost erased trails that slowly slumped downwards on the canyon walls. One particular site boasted a mine with three entrances branching off into the darkness under the canyon. Some mines were said to go back several miles but they were always too spooky and our flashlights too dim for us to venture very far inside.
Whenever we could we’d escape out our private entrance and ramble about the canyon under the watchful eyes of buzzards roosting atop dead pines waiting for a meal. It’s strange now to say we skipped along the edges of the paths oblivious to the potential for becoming buzzard food, but children are immortal in their own minds, are they not?
One day in (was it late autumn or before or after?) we were following a new path when we came upon a wide and long lava bed somewhere midway down the canyon. The lava was coal-black and had many lichen-covered stones protruding out of the crust. And in the midst of it all, there was one large lava spire that rose high above the bed below; a monolith that had felt the splash of the molten lava but had survived in a cooled lava shawl. The spire rose at least 20 feet above the canyon floor. At the top, the spire forked into several shards on all sides leaving the top open. And somehow in the top, there was enough earth for, strange in this High Sierra pine forest, for a stand of green bamboo to grow tall all around. It was like a giant lava planter with just a bit of a Chinese landscape at its top.
There was a hand-over-hand way of getting up into the bamboo at the top. We found it through the kind of determined trial and error a boy can have on a summer afternoon with nothing to do and the whole local wild world to explore. At the top, the bamboo thinned towards the center and we squeezed inside to be able to see the whole wide world of the canyon around us without being seen at all. It was a boy’s summer dream. It was impregnable. It was
“This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,”.
And so we did what any two young boys would do. We improved our fort and hauled in supplies. With some pruning sheers that my mother convinced herself she must have mislaid, we carefully trimmed out the inside stands of bamboo until a comfortable space was made (invisible to outside eyes) for two brothers to relax in a comfortable manner. We hauled in some water in bottles and some “rations” consisting of apples, jelly sandwiches, and chocolate chip cookies. These “rations” did not last the afternoon when we would pour over our latest comic books bought at the Paradise drug store and soda fountain.
After sober consideration, Tom and I decided that grown-ups could not be allowed to know what we were up to and where our fortress was located. To heighten our fortress security measures we named the place: “X.” After that, we always referred to it as such confident that no eavesdropping adult would be able to break our code.
Bored with being the only unattacked fortress in California we would sally out from the bamboo and climb down onto the lava flow to pick through the gold rush garbage dump at the bottom of the flow.
The considerable garbage tip of gold rush detritus had been formed when the various gold mining operations in Paradise had been producing in the mid-1900s to well into the beginning of the 20th century. The rush for gold was over but there was still gold in them thar hills and many prospectors still worked the streams, rivers, and canyons. Up and down the streams and canyons of Paradise, there were still places that were showing enough color for man to get enough of a poke for his whiskey and fixings and other needful things in their ramshackle camps along the canyon’s edge. When such needful things were used up or the gold played out, the garbage was taken to the top of the lava flow and disposed of by just chucking it over and watching it tumble until it disappeared into the tangled madrone and manzanita at the rock-studded bottom.
But what was garbage to a gold miner was gold to a couple of young boys. We found old whiskey bottles and jars of uncertain provenance. We found rusted metal sheets and rods that we fashioned into a lean-to deep inside the bamboo walls of “X” so we could store our comic books and other treasures. We found many things and then…
then…
Then there was the day when we cut back a bunch of manzanita branches and pulled out a tightly dovetailed and nailed wooden box with the top stove in. Tom pulled back the shattered wood of the top to reveal a torn sheet of stiff brown paper. Widening the rip in the paper we looked in and saw about half a case of dynamite composed of broken sticks on the top and whole sticks of TNT on the bottom of the box. Read the rest of this entry »
#Ukraine: A Ukrainian paratrooper of the 95th Air Assault Brigade ambushed a Russian T-80BV tank at close range in the East. It was destroyed. pic.twitter.com/p9CzuhdYHa
The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. …
We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. … [W]e need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.
Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.
I’m sorry somebody called you genocidal, Emily Oster. That must’ve been tough for you. You know what’s also tough? Getting your head kicked in by riot police because you had the temerity to protest against indefinite population-wide house arrest.
Or being fired from your university job and banned in perpetuity from the premises because you uploaded a video to social media complaining about the onerous and expensive testing requirements imposed upon unvaccinated staff. Or being confined to your house and threatened with fines because of personal medical decisions that had no chance of impacting the broader course of the pandemic in the first place. But somebody called this woman genocidal in French and she’s ready to move on, so it’s all good.
Emily Oster may have said a few reasonable things in the depths of her pandemic moderation, but she can take her proposal for pandemic amnesty and shove it all the way up her ass. I’m never going to forget what these villains did to me and my friends. It is just hard to put into words how infuriating it is, to read this breezy triviliasation of the absolute hell we’ve been through, penned by some comfortable and clueless Ivy League mommyconomist who is ready to mouth support for basically any pandemic policy that doesn’t directly affect her or her family and then plead that the horrible behaviour and policies supported by her entire social milieu are just down to ignorance about the virus. We knew everything we needed to know about SARS-2 already in February 2020. The pandemicists and their supporters crossed many bright red lines in their eradicationist zeal and ruined untold millions of lives. That doesn’t all just go away now.
A mountain climber in Japan fought off a hard-charging black bear and lived to tell the tale. The attack occurred while the unnamed man was traversing a precarious ridge near the summit of Mt. Futago. The entire ordeal was captured by a helmet-mounted GoPro camera, and the footage—which the climber posted to YouTube on October 1—has now been viewed more than 2 million times.
