Welllll…

It’s like this: going to Salisbury to see the sights is plausible as part of an extended tourist adventure. I know this for a fact because I’ve done it myself – gotten a rail pass and run around visiting places for seven days. Salisbury was one of the places, and I wasn’t disappointed. But as a destination? On a one-day trip to London? Nah.

And now there’s Pyotr Verzilov. Masha Gessen at the New Yorker:

There is little I can say about the latest apparent poisoning in Russia that I haven’t said before. And before that. And more recently. That Russian enemies of the current regime are often killed, most frequently by poisoning, is now a

These Trumps. Eric this time.

Eric Trump was talking up his father on Fox News on Wednesday morning when he was lobbed a friendly prompt from one of the network’s anchors.

During a segment that touched on Democrats’ calls for impeachment as well as the current success of the economy, “Fox & Friends” host Steve Doocy brought up the perception created by both Bob Woodward’s new book and the New York Times’s anonymous op-ed last week that the Trump administration is in chaos.

But they sure are getting a lot done, Doocy smarmed.

Trump then launched into an attack in the second person about someone who writes a “sensational nonsense book” and is rewarded with a CNN appearance, before

Now to cheer us up…

A view of storms over the Cascades this evening, seen from the office! #wawx pic.twitter.com/xAQHDRNMDd

— NWS Seattle (@NWSSeattle) September 13, 2018

That’s Lake Washington. It forms the eastern border of Seattle (and continues well past it north and south – it’s about 20 miles long) while Puget Sound makes the western border. The National Weather Service office is at NOAA, which is at the northern edge of Magnuson Park, which is a huge wildish heath that used to be a naval base. This is a view accessible to the public.

There’s a lot to like about Seattle.… Read the rest

The Times (NY) is doing a live update on the hurricane.

The storm is forecast to crawl inland, drenching a wide area with extremely heavy rains — 20, 30 or even 40 inches of rainfall are predicted in some spots on the Carolina coast. Places as far inland as Charlotte, about 150 miles from the coast, could receive more than 10 inches of rain. Learn more about why slow-moving hurricanes are so dangerous here.

It’s kind of hard to imagine 40 inches of rain.

President Trump on Thursday falsely accused Democrats of inflating the death toll from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico last year, rejecting a government assessment that the storm had claimed nearly 3,000 lives. Read more

More on that whole North Carolina coast – climate denial – ignore the future tragedy:

The approaching storm almost certainly gained destructive power from a warming climate, but a 2012 law, and subsequent actions by the state, effectively ordered state and local agencies that develop coastal policies to ignore scientific models showing an acceleration in the rise of sea levels.

In the years since, development has continued with little regard to the long-term threat posed by rising sea levels. And the coastal region’s population and economy have boomed, growing by almost half in the last 20 years.

In other words state law has put a large number of people in harm’s way, because of pure obstinate fingers-in-ears Denial.

Business

Ah, this Mark Knight has a history with the racist cartoons thing. Imagine my surprise.

On Wednesday, the Herald Sun provided its response to critics of the cartoon by doubling down. The newspaper republished Knight’s Serena Williams image as part of a front-page montage of Knight caricatures — including of President Trump — with the headline “WELCOME TO PC WORLD” and the text: “If the self-appointed censors of Mark Knight get their way on his Serena Williams cartoon, our new politically correct life will be very dull indeed.” The cover includes the cheeky label “Satire Free Zone.”

…

In early August, for a cartoon about train-station safety in the Australian state of Victoria, Knight also faced ire for how

If you were worrying about Hurricane Florence, about to dump 20 inches of rain on South and North Carolina, don’t: Rush Limbaugh says it’s all a ploy to big up climate change.

The right-wing radio host said during his show that hurricane forecasting has been amplified in order to convince people that climate change is causing greater natural disasters, noting how previous hurricanes are downgraded before they make landfall.

…

“These things have become very politicized as you know, folks. Hurricanes and hurricane forecasting is much like much else that the left has gotten its hands on, and they politicize these things. For those of you asking, ‘What’s the politics of a hurricane?’ Climate change is the politics of

Linda Bloodworth Thomason tells her story about Les Moonves at CBS and this time it’s not about the sexual assaults, it’s about the systematic and deliberate exclusion of female-created content. It’s a bit like a male publisher telling Jane Austen to stop sending her pesky novels, he doesn’t want them.

I was never sexually harassed or attacked by Les Moonves. My encounters were much more subtle, engendering a different kind of destruction. In 1992, I was given the largest writing and producing contract in the history of CBS. It was for $50 million, involving five new series with hefty penalties for each pilot not picked up.

Penalties for the studio, that is; I didn’t understand that until the end, … Read the rest

Now the Herald-Sun, the Australian paper that ran the strikingly racist cartoon of Serena Williams, is doing the free speech martyr act.

The Herald Sun newspaper has republished its controversial cartoon of tennis star Serena Williams on a defiant front page in which it attacked its critics and foreshadowed a future where satire is outlawed.

“WELCOME TO PC WORLD,” read the paper’s headline, over a collection of Mark Knight cartoons, including the depiction of Williams spitting a dummy and stamping on her racquet.

The cartoons are broad, yes, but they’re not racist. That one of Williams – we’ve seen those before.

“If the self-appointed censors of Mark Knight get their way on his Serena Williams cartoon, our new politically

Hey it costs money to lock up more and more scary Mexicans illegal immigrants, and that money has to come from somewhere. Oh I know: take it from FEMA, they don’t do anything useful.

Newly revealed documents show the Trump administration took nearly $10 million away from FEMA and other federal agencies to apparently pay for immigration detention centers. A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, the agency which FEMA is a part of, said under no circumstances was any disaster relief funding transferred from FEMA to immigration enforcement efforts.

CBS News’ Jeff Pegues reports the money in question was transferred back in August to ICE. A source at DHS tells Pegues the funds were transferred to

Interesting. We’re supposed to despise people who are on welfare because they should get a job no matter how scarce jobs are where they live or how young and dependent their children are or how hard they’re working in school to improve their chances of finding work…but also, it turns out, we’re supposed to despise people who do have jobs if the jobs are not posh enough for our refined tastes.

Former Cosby Show actor Geoffrey Owens made headlines this holiday weekend after a New Jersey shopper snapped photos of him bagging groceries at a Trader Joe checkout line — then provided them to the Daily Mail.

Instantly, Owens — who played the Huxtables’ affable son-in-law Elvin on

The Goldsmiths LGBTQ+ mash note to Stalin and the Gulag made it into the Telegraph:

Students at a leading London university have been condemned as blind to reality after defending the system of Soviet Gulag labour camps where thousands perished as “compassionate” places of rehabilitation.

Trans rights campaigners at Goldsmiths University described the Gulags as benign places where inmates received education, training and enjoyed the opportunity to take part in clubs, sports and theatre groups.

In fact most historians agree they were a brutal network of labour camps used by Stalin’s Soviet dictatorship to incarcerate internal opponents and so-called ‘enemies of the state’, resulting in the death of more than an estimated 1.05 million people.

But they did it … Read the rest

Carl Benjamin aka “Sargon of Akkad,” famed misogynist bully, was on an EU parliament panel to discuss free speech at the invitation of a UKIP MEP.

A MAN who was fined after filming a pet dog giving Nazi salutes has rubbed shoulders with Nigel Farage after being invited to speak about his case at the European Parliament.

Mark Meechan met with the former UKIP leader and his successor Gerard Batten as he spoke at a conference on threats to free speech on the internet.

…

Meechan, of Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, raised more than £193,000 through a crowdfunding page to pay for legal fees to fund an appeal against his conviction and sentence but his application was refused.

He joined

The gulagsplaining turned out to be a step too far even for the Goldsmiths Student Union. Their statement:

Yesterday, Monday 10th September, a member of the LGBTQ+ Society with access to their Twitter account posted tweets containing offensive material. We condemn the abhorrent content of the tweets and they are in complete opposition to the views and values of the Students’ Union.

The Society have broken multiple Union policies and procedures, including failing to adhere to our code of conduct, and we have issued multiple requests for the group to delete the tweets. As such, the Society have been suspended and disaffiliated from the Students’ Union, pending investigation.

I think they should have said what the tweets were about … Read the rest