Should you choose to accept it

Luther M. Siler3 Comments

I’ve got a job for y’all.

Go here. I don’t care if you’re trans or cis. I’m cisgendered and I’m doing it so you should too.

Purchase some stickers. Once they show up, leave them in your car.

And every time you walk into a business, until your stickers are gone, go to the bathroom at that business and spread chaos.

I gotta find an excuse to take a piss in a church.

(Also, the bathrooms at my local Lowe’s, which was my first target, are surprisingly clean and pleasant.)

In which … oops?

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

I have, no doubt, no bullshit, completely forgotten to post two days in a row. In my defense, I’ve been so Goddamned sick for the last two days that I lost six pounds. And not through healthy eating and sensible exercise, either. No, the other way.

It has, uh, not been an especially pleasant couple of days, so I hope you’ll find a way to forgive me.

In other news, today’s meeting of my speech and debate club quickly degenerated into hanging out and bullshitting with the small handful of students who showed up, and … man, these kids are built different. I don’t really want to get into the details because it reeks of oversharing but it’s absolutely amazing how much kids’ attitudes have changed in regards to certain things in just the last several years.

Meanwhile, my Governor signed a “don’t say gay” bill, and a friend of mine texted me suggesting that I might have to take my Pride flag down, and … well.

Briefly, endorsements

Luther M. Siler

This will be irrelevant to damn near all of you, but I just voted in the Democratic primary for the various local offices that are up this year. To wit:

  • James Mueller for Mayor;
  • Bianca Tirado for City Clerk;
  • Oliver Davis, Rachel Tomas Morgan and Karen White for at-large City Council; and
  • Sherry Bolden-Simpson for 5th District City Council.

I know Sherry and Oliver personally and they’re both good people, and Rachel Tomas Morgan has come by and knocked on my door a few times, so she gets points for being accessible. That said, the vote I feel strongest about is for Mayor Mueller, as his opponent is not fit for public office.

The election is next Tuesday.

On bullshit

Luther M. Siler

I was, for reasons that I can’t quite reconstruct at the moment, looking through my blog for everything I’ve ever written about Joe Biden the other day, and then this tweet came across my feed:

This irritated me at the time, and I snarked at the tweet, and for some reason it’s still on my mind a couple of days later so I’m going to piss on it again. This chart is bullshit, orchestrated by a media that is absolutely desperate to manufacture some drama about this upcoming election and whether Biden will be the nominee, which he absolutely will if he is still alive. First of all, let’s look at the actual claim: that Biden has the second-lowest “ninth quarter,” which as we all know is a super important fucking metric, of post-WWII presidents. Second-lowest? Yeah, Reagan’s was worse.

You may not be old enough to remember the 1984 election. I am, though. It looked like this:

So this is already a bullshit statistic, because the worst “ninth quarter” performance by a president since WWII led to a fucking ass-whupping in 1984 unseen since, what, fucking FDR? (EDIT: Yep. I looked it up.) Mondale won his home state and Washington DC, and he only won Minnesota by eighteen hundredths of a point. It was 49.72% to 49.54%. Less than four thousand fucking votes. A bad storm in Minneapolis that day and he’d have lost.

That’s already fucked up, but it gets worse. The next two worst results also lost, but the two after that were Clinton and Obama, both under 50%, and both of whom won reelection comfortably. And the highest approval rating on that chart is George H.W. Bush, who lost. Humiliatingly, frankly.

I’m not quite pissed enough to run the statistics and figure out how related “ninth-quarter approval” is to reelection, but that’s at least partially because it’s obviously not. OpinionToday needs to shut the entire fuck up, and I really need to kill my Twitter account.

In which I wish it mattered

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

Whole lotta news today, chief among which is Tucker Carlson getting fired– probably, at least– by Fox News. They’re spinning it as “parting ways,” but when you say “see you Monday” at the end of a show on Friday and then go to work Monday morning and “part ways” with your company, I’m pretty sure you got fired.

As much as I would like to get all jubilant about it, I’m pretty sure Tucker Carlson is a Republican, and so is Fox News, institutionally at least, and so Rule One of Republicans applies: Republicans Always Get Worse, and Republicans Only Get Worse.

Carlson will somehow fail up into something even more prominent, and whoever Fox gives his show to will be worse than his was. I don’t make the rules, y’all, I just notice them when they’re 100% consistent over my entire life.