The Everything Else P&R

Precisely. My absolute favorite moments are when he’s giving a straight-to-the-point, thoughtful answer to an exaggerated or wild questions by a hyped up host trying to figure out worst case scenarios because of breaking developments.

Brazil’s far right and leading presidential candidate was stabbed yesterday (he survived.)
.
Good luck Brazil, you’re going to need it.

I hope Trump’s paying attention - a stabbing could improve his popularity!

Problem is we live in bizzaro land, he would have to be the one doing the stabbing as it would prove his alpha-ness.

That said I’d be really leery of drawing anything from that. I don’t know enough about Brazilian internal politics, and the facts candidate got stabbed shows things are indeed very dysfunctional.

Once the genie of political violence is out, it becomes very hard to put back in,

There is nothing good about that story, and I have nothing but sympathy for my Brazilian friends who are dealing with what sounds like a hopeless political situation.

I’m ok with this. Given his lack of knowledge in the realm of…well, everything, I hope he stabs one of his own vital organs during his next pep rally.

I was going to say ‘only if he stabs a Mexican or Muslim.’ But I think Trump could point his finger at literally anyone and convince his base to hate them. Exhibit A: John McCain.

So, yeah, you’re possibly right.

Geez, right?

@rhamorim, how you doin’ down there?

SNAFU, as is usual in the case of Brazil. :)

Of course, it’s not often that we get a presidential candidate stabbed, but politics here are always the worst kind of circus. Some orders of magnitude worse than anything in the US. You really don’t wanna know. ;)

But I am personally fine, thanks for asking. Brazil is headed to a dark place regardless of who wins that election, but we’ve been (as a nation) in rock bottom more than once. We’ll survive. I think.

Not sure where this ought to go, so I’ll put it here. Just want to share some good news for once. Maybe it’s just a drop in the ocean, but great that someone wants to make this effort.

Indeed it is. Pretty amazing an 18 year old managed to make this a reality:

The concept for the project began six years ago, when 18-year-old Boyan Slat, at the time a student, learned about the difficulty of removing plastic from the ocean. Because plastic is everywhere and the pieces continually move with currents, it isn’t possible to simply scoop it out with a net. Slat proposed using a barrier, instead, to gather plastic in one place, similar to the way that floating trash tends to collect at shorelines.

The idea, first presented in a TEDx talk, gathered enough traction that Slat dropped out of his university in 2013 to launch a nonprofit to produce it. He raised $2.2 million in a crowdfunding campaign and millions more from investors.

They should just dump it all onto the beach in front of Trump’s mara lago resort.

Sounds like a good opportunity for an 8th continent.

Watching BBC World News had on story on the rise of the far right in East Germany. They interviewed supporters of the AfD party and those people sound exactly like MAGA zombies (including a guy who used the N word before saying "oh we can’t use that word any more) but you know they’re not racist, nope just against immigration. (Reading any of the twitter threads on these stories is harrowing.)

Sweden elections today. Yes, even Sweden where a former neo-nazi party now called Swedish Democrats are expected to be the 2nd largest party in parliament after the elections.

My knowledge of tennis is limited to the names of the super stars, but it seems to me that this is one of the worse examples of bad referee at the highest levels of sports in many years.

And then instead of firing or discipline the ref, Tennis fines her $17,000 WTF. Also what is a coaching penalty, it seems utterly bizarre to me?

Yeah, that whole thing is pretty fucked up.

Everyone involved was robbed. Imagine potentially beating the greatest player the game has ever seen and then some Ref gets a bug up their ass and basically hands you a win. I’d be fucking furious.

Same for me. My limited understanding is that the playing field, as far as outbursts, is not level between men and women. That borders upon criminal. Literal theft.

Serena has done this on four different occasions. I think two of those were with women officials. It isn’t sexism, it’s a bad habit Serena has when she gets angry during a match.

Coaching players during a match is illegal. Players get called for it all the time, it’s routine. It has probably been called a dozen times during this US Open. Nadal was called for it last week. Serena’s coach admits he was coaching. For some reason (because she was being beat) she decided to take the warning personally.

Breaking your racket deliberately is an automatic code violation. It’s the second violation, so that’s a point loss.

Then she ranted at the umpire for two or three games, called him a liar, called him a thief, demanded he apologize, threatened his career, and so on. Those are all code violations. The third code violation is the loss of a game.

Also, too: The rules for code of contact are determined by the players. They can change them anytime they want, they just have to call a vote.

Awesome.

“You wouldn’t buy Nazi-themed clothing, would you?” the Baltic state’s foreign minister, Linas Linkevicius, tweeted on September 7. “We trust @Walmart’s moral stance & call to withdraw products with the symbols of mass murders.”




Given how consistently they’ve shit on her, I agree.

The Ocean Cleanup project is interesting, and it’s a case where doing something (especially trying something new) is almost certainly better than doing nothing, but my expectations are pretty well tempered for now, this article has some of the risks:

Surface plastic is a very visible problem, but it isn’t really the main problem with ocean plastics. That being said, getting it out of the ocean before it breaks down to microplastics seems like a good thing, as long as the capture devices themselves don’t cause harm to wildlife. And I’m always up for a good geo-engineering attempt, so let’s hope it works out.