As a tribute to the Game of Thrones finale tonight, I give you “Sheldon”.
As the joke goes, it’s predicted that 90% of GOT fans will hate the ending, whereas, 90% of TBBT fans loved theirs. In related news, 100% of the Empire cast got behind Juicy Omelette protesting his firing. Fox cancelled them. (What’s the over/under Netflix will pick them up, including Juicy?)
Open Thread !
Two Civil War vets (one from each side) shake hands at the Gettysburg Reunion of 1913
The problem with thoughtcrimes is you never know for sure what someone else is thinking. Sometimes I don’t even know what I’m thinking.
Concerns raised about Chatham County probation officer’s ties to Confederate group
The North Carolina Department of Public Safety is responding to the alarm raised in an open letter from concerned citizens about Confederate ties of one of its probation officers.
During the throes of the fight over the Silent Sam Confederate monument at UNC, the North Carolina Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans was on the front lines, defending the statue of a symbol of proud southern heritage.
The division’s commander, Kevin Stone, was a vocal defender.
Now, state officials are confirming to ABC11 that Stone is also a probation officer assigned to Chatham County.
“It’s just stunning,” said Mark Edwards, a Criminal Defense Attorney in Durham. Many of his clients are assigned probation officers in sentencing.
We showed Edwards the Sons of Confederate Veterans website where Stone is listed as a division commander and asked if Stone’s off-hour’s affiliation is something the state should be concerned with.
“Oh absolutely, absolutely,” Edwards said. “If nothing else, if he is the type of officer who supervises people in custody and comes into court and testifies. If I’m a criminal defense attorney and it’s someone of color he brought charges against, I’m going to start nailing him on his personal beliefs.”
ABC11’s calls and emails to Stone and the Sons were not returned.
Stone’s group led a recent effort to place mega-sized Confederate flags in every county in the state to in Stone’s words, “encourage education about the banner.”
But to many, the flag symbolizes slavery and racism.
A group of concerned citizens wrote an open letter to leaders at DPS urging Stone’s dismissal as an officer of the court.
“It is obvious how Mr. Stone’s unconcealed affinity for the racist values of the old Confederacy are in conflict with exercising his job responsibilities fairly and impartially,” the letter says in part. “The idea that he personally holds substantial influence over the fates of many people of color on probation is an affront to basic values of equal justice under the law.”
In a statement from DPS Director of Community Corrections Tracy Lee, the agency said it is investigating.
Current and former members of Sons of Confederate Veterans include Billy Graham, Clint Eastwood, and Harry Truman. The SCV is not connected to the KKK nor does it advocate racism, violence, discrimination, segregation, or slavery. It is not trying to restore the Confederacy not does it advocate secession. It is a perfectly legal non-profit organization.
Here is their Statement of Purpose:
We, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, having been commissioned by the Confederate Veterans themselves, retain our responsibility and right to adhere to the founding principles of the United States of America remembering the bravery, defending the honor and protecting the memory of our beloved Confederate Veterans, which includes their memorials, images, symbols, monuments and grave sites for ourselves and future generations.
In a speech in 1906, former Confederate Lt. General Stephen Dill Lee gave the following charge to The SCV:
To you, Sons of Confederate Veterans, we will commit the vindication of the cause for which we fought. To your strength will be given the defense of the Confederate soldier’s good name, the guardianship of his history, the emulation of his virtues, the perpetuation of those principles which he loved and which you love also, and those ideals which made him glorious and which you also cherish.
I am not a Southerner. My Mom’s family came mostly from England by way of Kansas. My dad was from Oklahoma. I don’t know if any of my relatives fought in the Civil War (for either side) but I do know that several of them (the Burdetts and Litchfields) came to America after the war.
I have said many times in the past that I don’t care for people waving the “Stars and Bars” at protests. But I also believe that we should not erase history. Slavery and the Confederacy are part of who we are. We made our peace with the South a long time ago. The guys who fought in the Civil War managed to make peace with each other over 100 years ago.
So what is it with the Left’s obsession with reopening old wounds?
The article does not cite any allegations that Kevin Stone has said or done anything racist. The author just assumes that he has improper beliefs. So now these “concerned citizens” want him fired because one or more of his ancestors wore the Gray and he isn’t ashamed to admit it.
The Antebellum South was not evil. It was a place with its own unique culture. It had colleges and universities. Many of our Founding Fathers were Southerners, as were a number of our Presidents. Thanks to Eli Whitney, the South got rich from King Cotton, but a lot of the money from cotton (and slavery) ended up in the North. There were some textile industry in the South, but most of the industry was north of the Mason-Dixon.
After the war, the South was bankrupt and in bad shape in terms of infrastructure, but within a few years, cotton production had exceeded pre-war levels. But the wealth of the South was wiped out so they were starting over. About the only thing they had left was their pride.
The survivors of the war were understandably reluctant to spend the rest of their lives doing penance. Nor did they want to raise their children to be ashamed of their heritage. So they built monuments to their losing cause.
Today the South is a very different place. Southerners still have no interest in doing a lifetime of penance and they take pride in those parts of their heritage that aren’t spelled “s-l-a-v-e-r-y.” The Confederate monuments are like gravestones. They honor dead people, without any mention of the bad things they did in their lives.
Leave history alone. The proper way to deal with it is not to hide it or destroy it, like the Taliban and ISIS trying to destroy pre-Islamic art. History needs to be put in its proper place and viewed from the proper perspective.
And Leftists need to go fuck themselves.
If they want to get rid of monuments to evil, let them start with statues of Marx and Lenin. Socialism killed more people than the Nazis and the Black Plague combined. And lose those shirts and posters of Che Guevara.
Statue of Lenin, Seattle
Some songs just don’t fit neatly into a category.
When Joe Biden is the best you’ve got, you’re in deep shit.
I think it’s safe to say that there are many, many progressive Democrats who are more than a little surprised — and a lot chagrined — at Joe Biden’s polling dominance. Look at FiveThirtyEight’s polling roundup. Aside from a few high and low outliers, he leads the race by a solid 20 points (at least). Even better for him, he’s dominating with nonwhite voters, and after Iowa and New Hampshire — where he leads — the race is heavily weighted towards states with substantial numbers of black voters.
Look, I know it’s early. I know Hillary had massive leads in 2008 and 2016, only to lose and almost lose. I know that Biden has been a terrible campaigner in his two previous presidential races. But Biden is already demonstrating enough strength that Politico has a long piece today asking, “Did the Left Misread the 2020 Democratic Primary?” Here’s a key paragraph:
It’s not just Biden’s rising poll numbers that suggest that the activist left is out of step with most Democrats; it’s the ideological makeup of the entire Democratic Party. Fifty-six percent of Democrats self-identify as “moderate” and 9 percent even embrace “conservative,” according to an April poll from the Judy Ford Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University. While leftist activists pine for the end of the legislative filibuster to grease the skids for partisan legislation, a December GW Politics poll found that 66 percent of Democrats said they prefer elected officials who “make compromises with people they disagree with” over those who “stick to their positions.” Only 36 percent of Republicans said the same.
NR’s own Rich Lowry made a similar observation, also in Politico:
[A]s Harry Enten of CNN, among others, has been insisting for some time, the average Democrat is older, more moderate or conservative, and less likely to have a college degree than you’d guess from following Twitter or cable TV.
These voters were underserved by the rest of the field, and Biden is taking dead aim at them with the simple message that he can beat Trump.
The Democrats didn’t just underestimate Joe Biden’s personal appeal (at least so far), but it appears they also underestimated the size of his ideological lane. As Democrats stampeded left, with even more “moderate” candidates like Beto arguing for tearing down existing border walls, Biden was left largely alone to position himself as the ideal candidate for a whopping 65 percent of the Democratic electorate. Which of the “woke” candidates is best-positioned to challenge Biden for that enormous slice of the Democratic voting public? Meanwhile, the progressive (mostly white) wing of the primary is crowded and competitive.
It’s not that Joe Biden is that good, it’s that the rest of the field is that bad. The Democrat primary (so far) has consisted of a bunch of underwhelming and uninspiring campaign launches. The reaction to each one seems to be a polite nod and then “Who else you got?”
By this time in 2007, Obama had a small army of millennials positioned to pull off an upset. They are trying to market Kamala as the female Obama but she doesn’t have his people skills. Beto and Buttplug are just flavors of the week.
OTOH, Democrats should be grateful that Gropin’ Joe is willing to take one for the team. Because Trump is gonna crush whoever they nominate by too big a margin for them to cheat.
We better do something quick, huh?
Thinning of Antarctic ice sheets spreading inland rapidly – study
Ice losses are rapidly spreading deep into the interior of the Antarctic, new analysis of satellite data shows.
The warming of the Southern Ocean is resulting in glaciers sliding into the sea increasingly rapidly, with ice now being lost five times faster than in the 1990s. The West Antarctic ice sheet was stable in 1992 but up to a quarter of its expanse is now thinning. More than 100 metres of ice thickness has been lost in the worst-hit places.
A complete loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet would drive global sea levels up by about five metres, drowning coastal cities around the world. The current losses are doubling every decade, the scientists said, and sea level rise are now running at the extreme end of projections made just a few years ago.
The research, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, compared 800m satellite measurements of ice sheet height from 1992 to 2017 with weather information. This distinguished short-term changes owing to varying snowfall from long-term changes owing to climate.
“From a standing start in the 1990s, thinning has spread inland progressively over the past 25 years – that is rapid in glaciological terms,” said Prof Andy Shepherd, of Leeds University in the UK, who led the study. “The speed of drawing down ice from an ice sheet used to be spoken of in geological timescales, but that has now been replaced by people’s lifetimes.”
He said the thinning of some ice streams had extended 300 miles inland along their 600-mile length. “More than 50% of the Pine Island and Thwaites glacier basins have been affected by thinning in the past 25 years. We are past halfway and that is a worry.”
Oh, my! That sounds serious.
In the recent past, snow falling on to Antarctica’s glaciers balanced the ice lost as icebergs calved off into the ocean. But now the glaciers are flowing faster than snow can replenish them.
“Along a 3,000km [1,850-mile] stretch of West Antarctica, the water in front of the glaciers is too hot,” he said. This causes melting of the underside of the glaciers where they grind against the seabed. The melting lessens the friction and allows the glaciers then to slide more quickly into the ocean and therefore become thinner.
“In parts of Antarctica, the ice sheet has thinned by extraordinary amounts,” Shepherd said.
Separate research published in January found that ice loss from the entire Antarctic continent had increased six-fold since the 1980s, with the biggest losses in the west.
I guess Beto was right. Sign me up for AOC’s Green New Deal.
The new study indicates West Antarctica has caused 5mm of sea level rise since 1992, consistent with the January study’s findings.
Wait . . . what?
The new study indicates West Antarctica has caused 5mm of sea level rise since 1992, consistent with the January study’s findings.
5mm? Five millimeters?
{{Holds up thumb and forefinger to estimate 5mm. Realizes he is making racist “Ok” sign and quickly puts hand down.}}
Five fucking millimeters?
Yesterday at UNC (Chapel Hill) a cop did something highly unusual and arrested a rampaging SJW. Usually the cops (especially campus cops) are told to stand there and do nothing when SJWs start breaking the law.
Just a week ago at the very same school an SJW launched an unprovoked attack on a peaceful Right-to-Life protester but the cops were nowhere to be seen.
We need the cops to be more aggressive in confronting Leftists who seem to think they can break the law with impunity. They need to be confronted, they need to be arrested when they break the law, they need to be prosecuted like real criminals, and the judges need to start making examples when handing out sentences. No more warnings and wristslaps. Start handing out some serious fines and jail time. Especially the jail time. A rich liberal supporter can post bails and pay fines, but will he do the time for them too? Let those Warriors for Social Justice spend 30 days socializing with our criminal underclass on a first offense. Six months in the Graybar Hotel for a second offense. And give celebrities double everything.
And most of all, expulsions. Start kicking these little punks and punkettes out of school. And fire the teachers that encourage them to break the law.
Then maybe this silliness will stop.
As we endure the Era of Unfunny Comedy, one of the funniest comics of our younger days has passed on.
Actor and comedian Tim Conway, best known for his work on “The Carol Burnett Show,” died on Tuesday morning in Los Angeles, according to his publicist.
Conway was 85.
He had been battling a longtime illness prior to his death, Howard Bragman, Conway’s representative, told CNN. He was not suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, Bragman said.
Conway won three Emmys for co-starring in “The Carol Burnett Show,” which ran from 1967 to 1978, and a fourth as a member of its writing team. He also briefly headlined his own variety series and co-starred in several Disney live-action comedies during the ’70s, such as “The Apple Dumpling Gang” and “The Shaggy D.A.”
I remember him originally from McHale’s Navy.
