Benny Johnson was stroke shaming Fetterman on Twitter, and I called him out.
I think it's cool he's using captioning to help him communicate. And when speaking he doesn't sound like someone who's had a stroke. At the video segment below, he admits he messes up his choice words, saying "that's the stroke."
He could do a lot worse compared to Biden.
The full interview is here.
This story is completely accurate. I'm teaching on campus this semester, and whereas I normally have 40 students (the cap) in my Comparative and International Politics courses, neither class cracked 20 students at the start of the fall semester.
I also have a U.S. government class on campus, and it's full, but then, there aren't as many in-person, face-to-face classes scheduled compared to online remote (distance learning).
The pandemic has indeed changed things.
At the Los Angeles Times, "Overwhelming demand for online classes is reshaping California’s community colleges."
The Saudis apparently coordinating a cut in production in both countries, at a time when the global economy needs the opposite.
At the Wall Street Journal, "Riyadh dismissed American officials who said the output reduction would be perceived as siding with Russia, in a new blow to relations":
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia—Days before a major oil-production cut by OPEC and its Russia-led allies, U.S. officials called their counterparts in Saudi Arabia and other big Gulf producers with an urgent appeal—delay the decision for another month, according to people familiar with the talks. The answer: a resounding no. U.S. officials warned Saudi leaders that a cut would be viewed as a clear choice by Riyadh to side with Russia in the Ukraine war and that the move would weaken already-waning support in Washington for the kingdom, the people said. Saudi officials dismissed the requests, which they viewed as a political gambit by the Biden administration to avoid bad news ahead of the U.S. midterm elections, on which control of Congress hangs. High gas prices and inflation have been central issues in the campaign. Instead, the people said, the kingdom leaned on its OPEC allies to approve the cut, which is aimed at reducing production by 2 million barrels a day. Adrienne Watson, a National Security Council spokeswoman, rejected Saudi contentions that the Biden administration efforts were driven by political calculations. U.S. officials questioned a Saudi analysis that the price of oil was about to plunge and urged them to wait and see how the market reacted. If the price did collapse, U.S. officials told their Saudi counterparts, OPEC+ could react whenever they needed. “It’s categorically false to connect this to U.S. elections,” Ms. Watson said. “It’s about the impact of this shortsighted decision to the global economy.” Since the OPEC+ decision, the White House vowed to fight OPEC’s control of the energy market. Lawmakers from across the political spectrum called on the U.S. to cut off arms sales to Saudi Arabia. And U.S. officials started looking for ways to punish Riyadh. In one of its first responses, U.S. officials said, the Biden administration is weighing whether to withdraw from participation in Saudi Arabia’s flagship Future Investment Initiative investment forum later this month. According to people familiar with the matter, the U.S. has pulled out of a working group meeting on regional defenses next week at the Gulf Cooperation Council, based in Saudi Arabia. Mr. Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia in July was meant to repair relations after the president entered office with a vow to treat the kingdom as a pariah over human rights, particularly the 2018 killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of Saudi agents. Images of the president’s fist bump with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman became a polarizing symbol of the trip. But according to people inside the Saudi government, Mr. Biden’s July visit did little to change Prince Mohammed’s determination to chart a foreign policy independent of U.S. influence, in a break from almost 80 years of American-Saudi partnership. If anything, said the people inside the Saudi government, the visit angered Prince Mohammed, who was upset that Mr. Biden went public with his private comments to the Saudi royal over Mr. Khashoggi’s death, which prompted Saudi officials to publicly contradict Mr. Biden’s characterization of their interaction. U.S. officials said they saw no indications in their talks with Saudi leaders in recent months that Mr. Biden’s comments about Mr. Khashoggi had been damaging to ties...
San Diego's ABC News 10 has disabled YouTube embed, which is no fun. I love to see the beauties on the front page of the blog.
Here's the lovely Ms. Olga, for CBS News 2 Los Angeles:
It's cooling down, finally.
Here's the lovely Ms. Megan: "ABC 10News Pinpoint Weather with Meteorologist Megan Parry."
Oh gawd, here we go again. It's going to be a long winter. *Eye-roll.*
At the Los Angeles Times, "Coronavirus subvariant BA.2.75.2 appears in L.A. County. How worried should we be?"
I'm not worried. At all.
Pre-order, at Amazon, Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.
From Michael Shellenberger, at Bari Weiss's Substack, "What happens when we leave people with psychosis to their demons? Ask the families of Alison Russo-Elling, Nathaniel Rivers, and Michelle Go":
Last Friday in Queens, New York, Peter Zisopoulos, 34 years-old, described by his neighbors as an “odd, quiet loner,” suddenly set upon Lt. Alison Russo-Elling, 61, a veteran paramedic walking back to her station after lunch. He knocked her down then stabbed her to death in a frenzy. He is now being held at the Bellevue Hospital Prison Ward undergoing a psychiatric evaluation, awaiting clearance from doctors that he is stable enough to face arraignment on murder charges. Zisopoulos, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, was hospitalized in 2018 after allegedly making anti-Asian threats. This attack is eerily like the one on that took place the afternoon of July 21, in the Bronx, when Nathaniel Rivers, 35, and his wife, the parents of a young son, were sitting in their car near their home, sharing a pizza, waiting for the rain to pass. Suddenly, 19-year-old Franklin Mesa came over to Rivers’ car window in an agitated state. Words were exchanged, briefly, before Mesa thrust a knife into Rivers’ chest. Rivers’ wife got out of the car, picked up a pry bar and clobbered Mesa. But it was too late: Mesa had mortally injured Rivers, who died a few minutes later. Mesa, who has been charged with Rivers’ murder, is said by his family to have schizophrenia. He was well known in the neighborhood for “hostile, aggressive” encounters. Police said he was arrested last year for twice punching somebody in the face. Mesa reportedly once tried to prevent a young mother from getting on a bus. And yet it appears that nobody made sure Mesa was taking his psychiatric medicine, which his sister said he had been on since he was 15. Had Mesa been properly medicated, Rivers almost certainly would still be alive today. These horrifying deaths rekindle the national debate over how to prevent violence by the seriously mentally ill. Between 2015 and 2018, 911 calls reporting emotionally disturbed people have jumped by nearly 25 percent in New York City. The share of homeless people in New York with serious mental illness, usually defined as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, has most recently been estimated at 17 percent. Consider the case of Martial Simon, a 61 year-old mentally ill homeless man, who early this year confessed to pushing 40 year-old Michelle Go onto the subway tracks, where she was killed by an oncoming train. Go was a manager at Deloitte who was lauded for her extensive volunteer work with struggling New Yorkers, including the homeless. Simon has spent decades bouncing between jails and hospitals. Declared mentally unfit to stand trial for the murder of Go, Martial is now being held at a psychiatric facility. Years before, his sister saw something like this coming, and she pleaded with the authorities to prevent it. “I remember begging one of the hospitals, ‘Let him stay,’” she said, “because once he’s out, he didn’t want to take medication, and it was the medication that kept him going.” The medical system was warned, by Simon himself, that exactly this was coming. As the New York Times reported: “A homeless advocate who saw Simon’s medical records reports that Simon even told a psychiatrist in 2017 that it was only a matter of time before he pushed a woman onto the subway tracks.” Though it is difficult to get an exact estimate, a large body of research makes clear that people like Zisopoulos, Mesa, and Simon are just three among hundreds of cases of people in New York alone—to say nothing of cities like Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco and others—in which mentally ill people off their medication have assaulted or killed people. And if you think the problem is getting worse, you are right...
RTWT.
Yesterday she posted "Two Words: Let’s Go Brandon!"
Obviously the two words were "fuck you" to Joe Biden (or just Joe Biden?), or at least that's the easiest account for her tweet, which she's not deleted. It's got over 10,000 RTs.
At Twitchy, "George Takei tries to mock Lauren Boebert’s ‘2 words’ tweet about Biden but drops the mic on his own head (AND Biden’s)."
I have exactly three digital subscriptions, to the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. (I go for hard news, even if it's biased sometimes; the New York Times is an amazing paper despite it's identity as a far-left broadsheet: and, frankly, for straight news the Wall Street Journal is just the best all around.) I also subscribe to a few Substack newsletters --- like Andrew Sullivan's --- but I go for the free reader model, where you just get the minimum level of content. I'm not going to be in the business of having $6.00 pulled from my checking account monthly by dozens of writers, many of dubious ability.
In any case, see Fortune, "Paywalls are here to stay, but they’re closing off the internet. Crypto can fix that."
This comes highly recommended.
At Amazon, Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings: Book One of the Stormlight Archive.
At the video, just after 10 seconds, the car was spared a direct hit, but the blast-shrapnel ignited the gas tank and blew up the vehicle. Pretty rad actually, though bummer for the occupants. That's definitely called being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
At the Wall Street Journal, "Russian officials blame Kyiv; Ukrainian officials have repeatedly threatened to hit the 12-mile bridge":
A major explosion on Saturday severely damaged the bridge connecting Russia’s mainland to the occupied Crimean Peninsula, disrupting traffic on a crucial artery for the supply of fuel, military equipment and food to Russian troops fighting to hold ground in southern Ukraine. The bridge, opened by President Vladimir Putin to great fanfare in 2018, was meant to symbolize the might of the Russian state and the permanence of Russia’s annexation of the peninsula four years earlier. Russia even released a feature movie about its construction. Russia’s investigations committee said three people died after the early-morning explosion of a truck on the bridge’s roadway next to a supply train that was carrying fuel. Mr. Putin signed a decree requiring the boosting of defenses for Crimean transportation and energy infrastructure links. The decree placed the country’s intelligence service, FSB, in charge of the measures. Sergey Aksyonov, the Russian-appointed leader of Crimea, raised the terrorism alert level to high through Oct. 23. Some demolition experts who analyzed footage of the blast questioned the Russian version and said that the explosion must have come from under the bridge, caused either by an explosives-laden boat, manned or unmanned, or by shaped charges placed by divers. Tony Spamer, a former British Army expert on bridge demolitions, said a truck bomb would have created a hole in the middle of bridge but wouldn’t have been sufficient to cut the reinforcing bar and cause the structure to collapse. “You’ve got to attack the whole width of the bridge. Looking at it, it looks like it was attacked from underneath. It’s a monster job,” he said. Russia rushed to launch ferry services as an alternative, a move made difficult by stormy weather. Crimean authorities said passenger traffic resumed Saturday afternoon on the two surviving lanes of the four-lane road bridge, and rail services should be restarted soon. Civilian flights to Crimea have been suspended since February. David MacKenzie, a senior technical director at COWI Holding A/S, a Denmark-based company that designs and builds some of the world’s largest and longest bridges, said it would take several months for Russia to be able to fully restore the destroyed spans of the bridge, and that the ban on truck traffic is caused by concerns that the bridge’s substructure has also been damaged. Weight restrictions are likely to be imposed on the railway bridge should it reopen, he said. “A quite significant fire has taken place, and it will have an impact on the strength of the steel that is there,” Mr. MacKenzie said. “There is a very good chance that the steel on the top of the deck may well have been heated to temperatures well above the limits that the steel takes.” Russian officials in Crimea were quick to blame Kyiv. “The Ukrainian vandals have managed to reach the Crimean bridge with their bloodied hands,” the speaker of Crimea’s legislature, Vladimir Konstantinov, wrote on social media. Other than ordering a commission of inquiry, Mr. Putin has so far remained silent on the incident, even as Russian lawmakers and politicians called for retribution. While Ukrainian officials have threatened to hit the strategic bridge in the past, there was no direct claim of responsibility from Kyiv. Senior Ukrainian officials, however, on Saturday expressed delight at the blow to Russian prestige. Alluding to Mr. Putin’s 70th birthday on Friday, Ukraine’s national-security adviser Oleksiy Danilov posted a video online of the burning bridge next to footage of Marilyn Monroe singing, “Happy birthday, Mr. President.” Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 is considered illegal by virtually the entire international community, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly said that he seeks to reclaim all Ukrainian territories seized by Russia. Russia in recent days moved to annex four other regions of Ukraine where fierce fighting continues, while Mr. Putin ordered the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of reservists to shore up the crumbling Russian front lines, prompting an exodus of Russian men to neighboring countries. Moscow on Saturday for the first time named an overall commander for the faltering campaign in Ukraine, Gen. Sergei Surovikin. Previously the head of Russia’s Aerospace Forces, he was this summer identified by the Russian Ministry of Defense as head of Group South, the military grouping that led the fighting to seize the southeastern city of Mariupol. He is a veteran of the Chechen campaign and a former commander of Russian forces in Syria. Russian nationalists and personalities such as Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and Yevgeni Prigozhin, owner of the Wagner private military company, have blamed a rival general, Col. Gen. Aleksandr Lapin, commander of Group Center, for recent defeats that saw Russia lose thousands of square miles in the Kharkiv, Donetsk and Luhansk regions. There was no word about Gen. Lapin’s fate. Crimea, the home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, has also become a focus for the Ukrainian war effort as its forces press farther south, especially in Kherson, where dozens of villages have been taken in recent days. Kyiv has attacked several high-profile targets in Crimea in recent months, striking a major Russian air base in Saky and a railway junction near the town of Dzhankoy. It has used American-made Himars missiles to hit the Antonivsky bridge in Kherson, a lifeline for Russian troops in the area. The bridge over the Kerch Strait accounted for the bulk of fuel and food supplies to Crimea and represented the only way of traveling to and from the peninsula for ordinary Russians...
