It may take a while. In a local news story from California, a woman visits the local UPS office looking for a delayed package. She was directed to an outdoor lot and told to look "in the pile."
Some of those packages had been sitting there for weeks.
Remember this story when you encounter news about efforts to hobble or dismantle the U.S. Postal System in favor of "more efficient" private enterprise.
I don’t think it was intentional, but it does seem really inappropriate given the noises she makes when you push her button.
Hasbro says it's in the process of removing the “Trolls World Tour Giggle and Sing Poppy” from the market and will be offering customers a replacement doll.
The teen had been suspended for taking a photo and video to raise an alarm after seeing that most of her fellow students weren't wearing masks to reduce the spread of coronavirus infections.
I don’t know if this is better or worse than the actual interview
If you were one of the 136,000 people glued to the television Monday night watching Axios’ Jonathan Swan interview President Donald Trump (or one of the millions who tuned in online later), I don’t need to explain to you what that experience was like. If you didn’t catch it you definitely should, and I’d say brace yourself but no amount of bracing will prepare you for the trainwreck that is this interview. I don’t mean it’s a trainwreck as in it was a bad interview, what I mean is Jonathan was the engineer trying to drive the train, and even though he did a hell of a job, the train was determined to crash itself because it’s just a faulty, dangerous, chaotic fucking train.
Look, we all knew it was going to be rough, but Trump really outdid himself. When it came time to talk about COVID-19 and how the country is doing (i.e. bad) Trump, ready with the facts, whipped out his expertly prepared stack of, uh, loose paper (no one could get him a binder? A duotang? Some staples? No?) containing two graphs with four points of data.
Don’t worry, it’s color coded.
This literally looks like a graph an elementary school student made to show which snacks his class likes best. But, hey, at least there’s no hand-drawn Sharpie edits on this one.
God we’re all fucking doomed.
It’s hard to say which moment really sticks out the most, because, well, there’s just so darn many. Perhaps it was when Swan brought up the rising COVID death toll in America and Trump answered, “It is what it is.” Or, maybe, when he said he wishes Ghislaine Maxwell well, for a second time. For me, Trump repeating, “Read the manuals, read the books” over and over as if that’s an answer to anything takes the number one spot. Hats off to Jonathan Swan, it can’t be easy to interview someone whose brain is full of worms.
But maybe that’s the key? Maybe the only person who should take on Trump is Trump?
In an edited version of the interview, YouTuber Justin T. Brown removed Swan entirely and let POTUS face off against himself. You’ll have to decide for yourself who won.
Democrats are accusing the Trump administration of sabotaging the nation's mail system as voters gear up to cast mail-in ballots during the coronavirus pandemic.
"During a Friday evening press conference at his Bedminster golf course, the esteemed President Donald J. Trump finally announced a momentous step in the sweeping healthcare reform plan he's been promising for years:
"Over the next two weeks I’ll be pursuing a major executive order requiring health insurance companies to cover all preexisting conditions for all companies. That's a big thing. I've always been very strongly in favor. We have to cover pre-existing conditions so we will be pursuing a major executive order requiring health insurance companies to cover all pre-existing conditions for all of its customers. This has never been done before."
The decade-old Affordable Care Act that already did this was not available for comment."
From the POTUS who said "Nobody knew health care could be so complicated." Text from BoingBoing.
The 79-year-old played "Auld Lang Syne" on the only item seemingly left unscathed — her beloved piano, which she received as a gift from her father on her wedding day.
I know they aren’t exactly the same chemicals, but this helped me understand the actual amount that was being held.
Not just the amount, but how irresponsibly it was stored.
Top photo: storage in Beirut warehouse before the explosion (cropped for size).
Next: Oklahoma City damage from 2.5 tons of similar material.
Last: Beirut damage from estimated 2,750 tons of it.
The bottom image is a screenshot from video at the Guardian link. Note the first two links have informed discussions re storage and ignition of this fertilizer. I'll put a couple video links in the next gif-fest.
Addendum: This informative comment from a reader:
It's not "Ammonium nitrate fertilizer", it's ammonium nitrate mixed with a fuel oil, usually diesel fuel, which combines to form Ammonium Nitrate Fuel Oil, or "ANFO" which is the designation used to differentiate it from the common fertilizer. The bags in the picture are clearly marked NITROPRILL which is just one of many brands of ANFO produced worldwide by many explosives manufacturers.
If you tried using that stuff as an agricultural fertilizer you would contaminate the soil, kill any existing crops and create a hazardous waste site. Forget the fertilizer component, it would be like spraying your fields and crops with diesel fuel and you would likely be shut down by the Environmental Protection Agency.
You learn something every day. Thank you to this reader.
A memorial obituary in today's New York Times is about Doris Buffett, who was entrusted with helping dispose of the enormous Buffett family fortune.
While he ran Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate that includes Dairy Queen, Duracell and Geico, Mr. Buffett entrusted his sister and a group of women she had recruited to sift the requests for financial help, assess their merits and monitor the impact of those that were granted.
In some cases they were sanctioned to satisfy more modest requests — for money to help pay for dental work, legal bills in custody cases, wheelchairs, automobile repairs, electric bills and the like.
Ms. Buffett’s own Sunshine Lady Foundation, which she founded in 1996, and, more recently, The Letters Foundation, which she and her brother founded, have focused tens of millions of dollars in large and small donations on individuals and organizations committed to educating prison inmates, battered women and low-income teenagers, and to improving the lives of the mentally ill while also easing the burden on their caregivers.
Ms. Buffett shunned what she called “the S.O.B.’s” — symphonies, operas and ballets — as recipients of largesse and instead concentrated on the underprivileged, as she did with The Letters Foundation.
“I rounded up a bunch of ladies, and we started reading letters,” she recalled. “Some of them were nutty, but most of them were from people who were genuinely desperate and just needed a little help” — “decent people who just didn’t have the breaks somebody else did.”..
Warren Buffett recalled in an interview that his sister, who was three years his senior, was always a “doer.”
“She would talk to every one of these people; she didn’t just write a check,” he said. “She was enormously empathetic and did something about it.”..
She, like him, wanted most of her fortune to be spent on solving problems in her lifetime.
“She really wanted her last check to bounce,” Mr. Buffett said.
>>> He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty...
OMG, yes. I was incredulous about some fucking nonsense that Trump has said and my MIL just smiled and said (without any irony), “Oh, he was kidding. He likes to joke around all the time.”
"Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace– all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.
Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty...
And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down..."
More at the link.
The second comes from Markus, a reader of TYWKIWDBI. He offered these thoughts in the Comment section below, but I've boosted them up here to the body of the post for wider viewing.
"Here in the UK, politics is less polarised than in the US. My wife and I have voted for all three major parties over the years. We sometimes vote against each other. We even know people who think Brexit was a good idea. And, whilst it may spark discussion, it never causes a rift.
But no one in the UK or anywhere else outside America has ever said a good word to me about Donald Trump. No one. Not one word. Ever. Even the famously impartial BBC now routinely uses phrases such as "claimed, without supplying evidence, that", or quotes him and then flat-out contradicts him in the next sentence. The three subjects on which the BBC is not strictly impartial are climate-change denial, Covid-19 misinformation, and the utterances of Donald Trump -- all of them toxic.
The man is a jaw-dropping catastrophe. He's too stupid to know he's stupid. He listens to no one, understands nothing, tells transparent lies, and believes them himself. He's the Dunning-Kruger effect on legs. He's a blundering, racist, misogynistic bully. Every decision he makes is more damaging than the last. Walking away from the Paris agreement in the middle of a climate crisis? Defunding the WHO amid the worst pandemic in a century? *Really,* Mr President? And all that imbecilic name-calling! What is he, six years old?
Hear me well: Donald Trump is a worldwide laughing-stock. He is America's humiliation. He has destroyed your reputation, your moral leadership and your credibility. He squanders your allies' goodwill. His capriciousness makes him difficult and dangerous to deal with.
And, since he always craves worldwide attention, Trump sets a bad example of what leadership ought to be. The UK wouldn't have tolerated a Prime Minister so temperamentally unsuitable, as given to lying, gaffes, abuse of power and serial infidelity, as Boris Johnson, if Trump hadn't inured us to such appalling behaviour. Don't get me wrong -- I'd rather have Boris for a year than Trump for a day -- but no previous PM in my long lifetime has behaved the way Boris does, or would have got away with it.
Making America great again after Donald Trump will take decades, but it can be done. Start by booting out Trump as quickly as possible, by any legal means: in November if you must, earlier if you can. Tackle the partisanship that sees people shouting past each other, assuming the worst of each other, and treating even life-or-death decisions as political footballs. Slowly, with the right leadership, you'll regain your moral authority and your dignity, and the world will learn to trust you again."
President Donald Trump is for the first time floating a “delay” to November’s presidential election, as he makes unsubstantiated allegations that increased mail-in voting will result in fraud.
>>> As a co-chair of Black Voices for Trump, Cain was one of the surrogates at President Donald Trump's June 20 rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma — which saw at least eight Trump advance team staffers in attendance test positive for coronavirus.
Then he was hospitalized in early July with severe symptoms. Gee I wonder where he contracted the virus. . .
I guess we’ll never know.
The former GOP presidential candidate was first hospitalized at an Atlanta-area hospital in early July after developing serious symptoms and testing positive for the virus, according to his Twitter account.
>>> “That border stays CLOSED,” wrote another. “Canadians may be polite but we aren’t CRAZY!” And another: “There’s no reason to believe Americans will care about the health of Canadians, given that relatively few seem to care about the health of other Americans
It’s so embarrassing to be an American right now
The photo above shows tour boats in the basin below Niagara Falls. The one on the bottom is from the American side, the one above is Canadian. If the difference isn't obvious, here's an infographic cobbled together from screencaps from the video at The Guardian:
“I see it many, many times a day. I look out the window, and there it is again,” said DiMaurizio, the vice-president and general manager of the main Canadian tour company, Hornblower Niagara Cruises.
His company’s boats can carry up to 700 people, but Ontario’s strict social distancing rules have only permitted them to carry six passengers at a time.
In contrast, the US-owned Maid of the Mist boats – which can normally hold around 500 people – are operating at 50% capacity.
The stark difference reflect radically different approaches that Canada and the US have taken to tackling the coronavirus pandemic – and their dramatically contrasting outcomes.
The US side of the falls lies within New York state, an area with a population of 19.5 million, and which has seen 414,000 Covid-19 cases and 32,000 deaths. On the Canadian side, Ontario – with a population of nearly 15 million – has seen 38,000 coronavirus cases and 2,755 deaths.
The disparity is a consequence of many factors, including universal healthcare, early travel bans and quarantine rules, mask wearing and physical distancing measures...
“We would really like to be in a position to have that [many customers] but you do have to balance it with supporting the province and their measures for keeping everybody safe. “So, yes, I’d like to be there. But I’m really glad Canada is faring as well as it is.”
“The North Star Stampede will take place with no spectators,” wrote Cimarron Pitzen, whose family has staged the rodeo since 1955. “If people would like to come and protest against this ridiculous Government Over Reach, feel free to do so, I will not stand in the way of peoples ‘Right to Assemble.’ ”
Within hours of Pitzen’s post, rodeo fans rallied. “I guess if thousands can protest in downtown Minneapolis we can protest in a field!” wrote Mike Milkovich of Hibbing.
“Who says that you can’t be protesting while sitting in the stands … and a rodeo is just happening to be going on,” replied Janet Chartier Bailey of Andover.
I am not anti-American, but I despair and never cease to be amazed by the ignorance, gullibility, and self-centeredness of a huge number of Americans, as exemplified by a man shown on the national evening news last night stating unequivocally "I'm not going to wear a damn mask just for someone else's benefit!!"
Addendum: This report from Vancouver Island, British Columbia:
Creek has been leading a group of volunteer watchdogs to monitor marine traffic, looking for Washington state boaters who have sneaked across the border into Canadian waters. They then report them to Canadian officials to try to keep them from docking and coming ashore. No hard feelings, he told me cheerily by phone this past week. But every American is seen as a loaded vector of disease.
“You need to get the pandemic under control. You need a rational person to take the helm of your country. Until then, all we’re saying to Americans is: Stay away. When you come against our wishes, pardon the expression, it pisses us off.”..
“Hard pass on opening the border — we’re a healthy nation with big plans, and you’re a failed society,” one Canadian replied to the congressional letter on Twitter.
“That border stays CLOSED,” wrote another. “Canadians may be polite but we aren’t CRAZY!”
And another: “There’s no reason to believe Americans will care about the health of Canadians, given that relatively few seem to care about the health of other Americans.”
Amen. If it were only the stupid people who were dying, it wouldn't be so bad.
Just to clarify it's still a minority:
The “Million Unmasked March,” which took its name from the social-justice march a quarter-century ago, drew about 250 people.
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