Crap.

 

I sure am glad to hear that, in the end, he got back to Victoria where he belonged to be with all of those who meant the most to him.

****

More, later, including a story of how the then young Horgan once good naturally called this not particularly proficient lacrosse player 'Chicken Legs' a very long Braefoot/Stevenson double park time ago.

(it's a descriptor that's still pretty much true, by the way, no matter how much bike riding I do)

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Their Own Reality.

TheAftermathCtd

RealityInterruptedVille


The above is from the fine folks at Ipsos via Mike the fellow biologist:

I bring it up in the here and now to give reader E.E. their due regarding their take on how things got this way:

...Blame it on a decaying American educational system and 40 years of Reganomics, and the decline of the middle class, especially in the USA...

E.E.'s comment is backed by a quote from way back in 2002 that was never quite confirmed to have come from Bush the Younger's chief propagandist Mr. Karl Rove:

"(W)hen we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do"

The point?

They, meaning all manner of Republicans, not just the Trumpian manosphereisterians of the moment, started building this thing that that destroys people's ability to view reality for what it actually is a long, long time ago.

OK?


_______

And, yes, I did go to that very fine ear worm in the kicker, above.


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The Revenge Of The Yutes!

TheAftermathCtd
YouthIsWastedOnTheWrongPeopleSometimesVille

It turns out that it's not just the olds hooked on Rupert Murdoch's propaganda channel, or worse, who are the entire problem.

And/or suburban soccer moms.

What it's all about this time, Alfie?

The youth:

I mean, just look at those shifts. 

And while young men shifted 28 points to Trump since 2020, young women moved 14 points that way as well.

It's got me wondering if, perhaps, this has less to do with Mr. Rogan's podcast and more to do with the Covid generation getting its revenge on the world.

________

Subheader's ear(ish) worm?...This!


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We're Still Waiting...

TheAftermath

CorporationsArePeopleMyFriendVille

I don't know about you but, personally, I'm still waiting for the puffed-up punditry down south, and that includes those superfine never Trump Republicans at the Bulwark, to open up the memory hole in the back of their collective heads and pull out the following, written by West Wing guy Aaron Sorkin on the OpEd page of the New York Times back in July:

...The problem in the real world is that there isn’t a Democrat who is polling significantly better than Mr. Biden. And quitting, as heroic as it may be in this case, doesn’t really put a lump in our throats.

But there’s something the Democrats can do that would not just put a lump in people’s throats with its appeal to stop-Donald-Trump-at-all-costs unity, but with its originality and sense of sacrifice. So here’s my pitch to the writers’ room: The Democratic Party should pick a Republican.

At their convention next month, the Democrats should nominate Mitt Romney...

I mean, can't you just imagine good old Tim Miller and/or David Brooks feasting on that one?

To which I would answer now, just as I screamed at the Sulzberger family's pixel screen back in the summer...


Jeb!


________

Subheader?....This.



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The Once And Future Silkiest Of Roads.

It'sAlwaysTwentyMinutesToNine

SomewhereVille


The lede of the latest from the world's pre-eminent Brooksologist, Driftglass:

A few years from now when the New York Times building lies in ruins, you will still find Mr. David Brooks there, sitting amid the rubble like Mrs. Havisham, wearing tatters, keeping himself warm by burning remaindered copies of The Road to Character and offering to trash "the Left" for the price of a meal, a first-class Acela corridor train ticket and a $60 glass of top-shelf airport scotch.

Mind you, he will reassure you, his condition is temporary. On his uppers only due to mistakes that will no doubt be rectified soon. Sure, things look a little bleak now. And, sure, Mr. Brooks' "teevee" appearances are now limited to sitting next to a discarded Amazon shipping box with the words "Meet the Press" scrawled on the side and fielding "questions" from a potato Brooks calls "David Gregory", but this is all just a misunderstanding. A glitch in the Beltway matrix. Just as soon as No Labels or the McCain/Lieberman party get back on their feet, and the Sulzberger family finishes up their vacation at whichever reeducation camp they've been assigned to, and that sweet-sweet Third Way money starts rolling, Brooks will be right back in the clover ...

Go read it all in its searing Swiftian satirical splendour...Here.

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The Band Wore Blue Shirts...

  ...And The Music Played On.

It was not a great morning for C. 

She had to be up early to take a sedative before I drove her down to the off-hospital, West Broadway Medical Industrial Complex located in Lotusland Central for some oral surgery.

All went well and she is now upstairs snoozing while various and assorted pharmaceuticals wear off.

Me, I booked off work for the occasion and am now down in the Subterranean Homesick Blues Room (i.e. the basement) trying to get caught up.

Truth be told however, especially given what happened last night and all that will soon follow, it was good to be out and about with all the other folks scurrying about getting on with their lives this morning.

As for the aftermath? 

I'm avoiding it all for the moment waiting for the sturm, drang and cacophonous clanging of the newscycle to dissipate before the real analysis begins.

____

Earworm in the header?...This!

And, if you really want to be blown away by The Man (in blue) shown above...This.

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All Gone To Look For America.

WeHaveNeverHitchhikedTo

SaginawVille

I have a confession to make.

Which is that I have something in common with Elon Musk.

Because, like Mr. Musk, I went to the United States on a student(ish) visa back in the go-go 1990's.

According to a trio of investigative journalists at the Washington Post, Musk ignored a major stipulation of his visa and never actually went to school, in this case graduate school in Palo Alto. Instead, Mr. Musk helped start a company called Global Link, which later became Zip2. Initially, pre-universal search engine, the company sold businesses a service that would give them an online presence. In 1999, just before the first the dot-com bubble burst, Zip2 was gobbled up by Compaq for 300 million dollars. At that time, the immigrant from South Africa, who was not, to the best of anyone's knowledge, eating the pets of Silicon Valley, made a cool 22 million.

I went to America on the reverse brain-drain ticket, which was a J-1 visa designed to lure STEM-types trainees to the country, many of whom stay legally afterward. I was a post-doctoral fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory which is perched above the University of California campus about half-way up the East Bay Hills. Initially, I was involved in a kind of public/private scientific partnership with a now famous pharmaceutical company that survived the bursting of the first biotech bubbles back in the 1980's. I worked feverishly on the project when I first got to the new lab in Berkeley and everything was set to really get rolling after a big Friday afternoon meeting about six months into my tenure. The following Monday my boss got a call from the company saying that they had decided to go 'in a different direction' and the project was dead. So much for curiosity-driven research.

In the end, the science part of my time as a post-doc worked out well enough that I got a few serious job offers, the best of which was to return to Lotusland, which we did a few years before Mr. Musk cashed in for the first time. 

Just as, and perhaps more, importantly than the science stuff, the life thing really worked out well when C. and I lived in Berkeley. It was a truly exciting place to be at the time and we made many wonderful friends. We also had the first of our two wonderful kids, then tiny, now Bigger, E., and we  came to love America and it all it can, and quite often does, stand for.

Here's hoping all of that has a chance to continue.

For America, I mean, come Tuesday...

______

While I was really, really steamed at the time, it turned out to be a stroke of luck that the original post-doc project was killed by the company...Why?....Because it never would have worked...We were chasing after something in the soups produced by tumour cells that doesn't exist!...And just in case you might be, for some crazy reason, remotely interested in what we're chasing these days there's...This.

Image at the top of the post...At the infamous UC Berkeley Sather Gate with the two E's on a visit back to town a bunch of years after we left for home.

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