The Games We Play

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Author: patd

“But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked. "Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad." "How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice. "You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

32 thoughts on “The Games We Play”

  1. Bill recaps the top stories of the week, including the GOP’s growing fealty to Donald Trump and calls to boycott Spotify.

  3. https://youtu.be/GzH7AyYGDks

    Oh the games people play now Every night and every day now Never meaning what they say now Never saying what they mean And they wile away the hours In their ivory towers Till they’re covered up with flowers In the back of a black limousine [Chorus:] La-da da da da da da da La-da da da da da de Talking ’bout you and me And the games people play

    […]
    People walking up to you Singing glory hallelulia And they’re tryin to sock it to you In the name of the Lord They’re gonna teach you how to meditate Read your horoscope, cheat your faith And further more to hell with hate Come on and get on board [Chorus:] La-da da da da da da da La-da da da da da de Talking ’bout you and me And the games people play

  4. lawyers like to play games too. 

    is this tactic for real or only for delay purposes:

    TheHill

    A defendant who faces multiple charges connected to the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol is asking to subpoena former President Trump, among others, as a trial witness.
    Attorney Samuel Shamansky on Friday submitted court filings on behalf of his client, Jan. 6 defendant Dustin Thompson, asking for a judge to allow them to subpoena Trump and others to testify as witnesses in Thompson’s trial. 
    “Defendant submits that the individuals he seeks to subpoena are in exclusive possession of information relevant to this case. Moreover, their testimony is necessary to ensure that Defendant’s constitutional right to present a complete defense is safeguarded,” according to the court filings.
    “It is anticipated that, when called as a witness, Donald J. Trump will testify that he and others orchestrated a carefully crafted plot to call into question the integrity of the 2020 presidential election and the validity of President Biden’s victory,” the filings add. “Moreover, it will be established at trial that Mr. Trump and his conspirators engaged in a concerted effort to deceive the public, including Defendant, into believing that American democracy was at stake if Congress was permitted to certify the election results.”
    The court filings indicate that if Trump and others were compelled to testify in Thompson’s trial, their testimony would show that they had wanted to prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election results. 
    “Defendant submits that the testimony of Mr. Trump and his conspirators will establish that they were determined, by any means necessary, to prevent Congress from fulfilling its constitutional mandate to certify the election results,” the court filings said. “In order to accomplish that goal, the conspirators Defendant now seeks to subpoena engaged in a concerted effort to organize, encourage, and direct rally participants to storm the Capitol, enter the grounds, ‘fight like hell,’ and ‘engage in trial by combat.”
    […]
    The defendant has been charged with obstruction of an official proceeding and aiding and abetting; theft of government property; entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly conduct in a Capitol building and parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building.
    According to Thompson’s statement of facts and complaint, security footage inside the Capitol allegedly showed him inside the building holding a bottle of bourbon. The court filings also allege that he ran away from law enforcement after he was found with a coat rack that officials believed was inside the Capitol.
    [continues]

  5. truth telling by a government leader or by legislators matters?  what?  this guy must not know about how little truth telling matters to the magaTs and their cult leader and his GOPer disciples across the pond.

    BBC:

    Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Mr Gibb, who has served under three prime ministers and who lost his position as schools minister in Boris Johnson’s reshuffle last September, said his constituents were “furious about the double standards” and that “to restore trust, we need to change the prime minister”.
    He said Covid restrictions imposed by Mr Johnson were “flagrantly disregarded” in Downing Street, and the PM was inaccurate when, in December, he told the House of Commons there was no party.
    “Some argue that eating a few canapes with a glass of prosecco is hardly a reason to resign. But telling the truth matters, and nowhere more so than in the House of Commons where, like a court of law, truth must be told regardless of the personal consequences,” he wrote.

  6. patd,
    It’s a game. Shamansky knows without doubt that any witness called to give the testimony proffered in his filings will plead the 5th, which he hopes will get the jury to draw the inference the court will admonish them that they may not draw 

  7. kudos to the editors of st. louis post-dispatch

    Editorial: Hawley posts a fist-pump to ignorance with his position on Ukraine | Editorial | stltoday.com

    Something serious appears to have prompted Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., to label a fellow Republican, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, a “con artist” and “one of the worst human beings.” Perhaps it was Hawley’s public questioning of the need to defend Ukraine from a Russian invasion. Maybe it was when Hawley this week urged President Joe Biden to cave to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demand that Ukraine be officially denied membership in NATO. Or maybe it was when Hawley falsely asserted that Biden is to blame for Ukraine’s predicament.
    There once was a time when Hawley had presidential aspirations, but a badly timed fist-pump on Jan. 6, 2021, along with his appeasing advocacy of Russian supremacy just about closes the lid on his presidential dreams. We thought Hawley should’ve resigned his Senate seat for his role in the Capitol insurrection, but the idea that the United States should kneel down to Russia over Ukraine underscores how grossly unfit Hawley is to continue in office.
    Perhaps the young senator should be forgiven for his naivete regarding Russia. He wasn’t even born during the worst years of the Cold War, and he was still in diapers when Moscow invaded Afghanistan and dominated half of Europe. So he might not remember why containing Russian expansionism remains such a big deal for older Americans. Republicans these days seem averse to reading any history that makes them feel bad about themselves, which could explain why Hawley’s ignorance is so embarrassingly on display in Washington.
    Hawley tweeted on Wednesday: “If Russia invades Ukraine, the Biden Administration can blame one person above all: Joe Biden. He’s given Putin his own slush fund in Nord Stream 2 and failed to aid Ukraine when he could have.”
    A short history lesson is in order. Biden became president a year ago. Before that, Donald Trump was president. Trump is the one who denied military aid to Ukraine to extort its leader into helping with Trump’s reelection effort. The person who failed Ukraine was Trump, and it earned him an impeachment. Biden in the past year has shipped around $650 million in military aid to Ukraine as Russia amasses more than 100,000 troops on its border. So Kinzinger’s “con man” critique of Hawley seems precisely on target.
    Hawley describes Europe as a “secondary theater” and suggests that the only international situation worthy of administration attention is China. He outlined his limited understanding of world affairs in a three-page letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Hawley was “parroting” Moscow’s talking points and “digesting Russian misinformation.”
    China does, in fact, matter. But China isn’t amassing troops to invade and swallow up another country. Russia is — just like the Soviet Union did when Hawley was in diapers. But there we go again with all those historical facts that bring such discomfort to folks like Hawley.

  8. https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/04/weather/artificial-snow-beijing-olympics-climate/index.html

    OM mentioned the snow at the games wasn’t the natural variety.

    “…climate variability has forced the Winter Games to be virtually 100% reliant on artificial snow — part of a trend that is taking place across winter sports venues around the world.”

    “…human-made snow is incredibly resource-intensive, requiring massive amounts of energy and water to produce in a climate that’s getting warmer and warmer. Elite athletes also say that the sports themselves become trickier and less safe when human-made snow is involved.”

    “And with 1.2 million cubic meters of snow needed to cover roughly 800,000 square meters of competition area, according to the Slippery Slopes report, the water demand at this year’s Winter Olympics is massive.”

  9. https://reasonstobecheerful.world/regional-olympics-beijing-winter-games/

    “The Nagano Olympics were, in reality, a regional Olympics, in which many events were held in other cities more than 90 minutes away. It wasn’t the first time the games had spread out over a vast area. The 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France took place across an area of about 650 square miles.”

    “But the Games at Nagano and Albertville raise an intriguing question: Why not always make the Olympics a regional event? The Games have become such a cumbersome beast that many cities now dread their arrival, knowing they’ll result in huge debts and massive amounts of unneeded infrastructure. Why not disperse all that infrastructure — along with its imposing costs — across an array of co-hosting cities?”

    “What if Lake Placid could co-host the Games with another medium-sized city like Albany, more than 100 miles away? Even Montreal was floated as a potential partner, raising the tantalizing prospect of a trans-national Olympics.”

    “Spreading the wealth between two or more cities could diffuse some of the impact of the Games, while also bestowing each location with infrastructure of a more reasonable, sustainable scale. It could also open up the process to smaller cities that rarely get that level of investment, and generate the kind of inter-city transit connections that would otherwise be tough to get off the ground. Case in point: the bullet train that today carries 10 million yearly passengers from Tokyo to Nagano in 80 minutes was built for the 1998 Games. Albertville’s sprawling Olympics also resulted in a new train line connecting the host city to Paris. And little Pyeongchang, South Korea (population: 43,000) got a world-class high-speed rail connection to Seoul out of its 2018 Winter Games.”

  10. https://www.texastribune.org/2022/02/03/texas-republicans-abbott-primary-votes/

    “Casteel, the former Trump political consultant, said none of the candidates have the legitimacy to lead the charge and that he’d be surprised if a single one of the candidates achieves a double-digit percentage of the vote.”

    “Casteel said policy positions like secession, eliminating property taxes outright and perpetuating the falsehood of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election — all discussed at-length during the College Station candidate forum — are simply too fringe to secure a large enough base of Republican voters in this cycle.”

    “People are sick of crazy people,” Casteel said. “Let’s be honest, these are crazy people.”

    —

    “The governor was booed. Not by the whole crowd, but loudly enough by a group of Trump supporters, members of his own party, that it was distinctly audible to those watching livestreams of the event.”

    “The intraparty knock against Abbott comes in spite of his endorsement from Trump and on the heels of what he’s celebrated as one of the most conservative legislative sessions in modern Texas history.”

    “The root of the anti-Abbott sentiment on the right stems from the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 when the governor used his executive authority to implement a statewide mask mandate and a shutdown on certain businesses.”

    “Since Abbott lifted those measures, he’s pivoted hard and promised that there would be no more local safety precaution mandates allowed for masks, vaccines or businesses.”

    “Mary Ashley Vance, a Texas A&M student, attended a forum that featured Abbott’s primary opponents in College Station last month. She said she plans to vote for Huffines, who she said appeals to people who fueled the vocal grassroots movement that propelled Trump to the White House in 2016.”

    “Although Vance voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020 and believes he championed conservative values during his presidency, she said she takes his endorsement of Abbott with a grain of salt.”

    “I’ve never really seen him as someone who was personally invested in what he was promoting,” she said of Trump. “He’s just doing what he sees as being in his best interest.”

    It sounds like the kingmaker is no longer king.

    Now, more than ever, I feel like I need to move to a blue state.

  11. Given all the political games, it is no wonder a large chunk of the population has dropped out of the fray in favor of

    Wordle 231 3/6

     

    ⬜🟩🟨⬜🟩

    🟨🟩🟩🟨🟩

    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

  13. The gqp whine of commercializing the weather service is very old and stupid.  The last twenty hours is a good view of why.  The commercial service owned by IBM has forecast the local weather as winds from the north at four miles per hour with gusts to eight miles per hour.  The federal forecast was nineteen miles per hour with gusts to forty miles per hour.  The reality is the government forecast.  Sure the commercial model uses the government forecast but “adds intelligence” , yup.

  14. BiD…  your 10:46 post about spreading out the Olympics is a great idea, IMO.  The only reason Beijing got the Olympics so soon again is because it was one of only 2 places that wanted these games.  
     
    Man made snow for skiing is just a reality nowadays.  Most ski areas here in NH have to make man made snow as their base so that they can open around Thanksgiving.  The local area where Rick skis has had a horrible season so far…  too much ice this year.  Yesterday we got an inch of sleet that has now frozen solid.  I LOVE snow… but hate ice.  So far… this winter has been hell.

  15. Yep, Lindsey Vaughn said all of the skiers were used to this “chalky” snow. 

    Most of our ice should be gone by the end of the day.

  16. Renee,  even when I was in NH in the 80s the vast majority of the popular trails at Waterville Valley, Loon, Cannon and the Mount Washington and Bethel, ME areas were primarily man made snow.  It was an unusual winter that there was sufficient natural snow for decent cover.  The competitive skiers much preferred the blown rather tan natural snow – it held up better on the runs. A foot of powder groomed down to less than 2” of cover, and that didn’t happen all that often.

  17. This was a tepid response by Trump standards to Pence, I think he’s spooked. No personal insults against Pence, instead yet another attack on Mitch. Worried about not provoking Pence to tell all to J6 committee but I guess that ship has sailed

  19. Well I’ve seen some weird stuff on tv but this one might take the cookie:
    Abe Lincoln vs Zombies
    i watched the opening but then had to decamp. Just a bit too weird.

  20. Hmm, “going to hell” with more jobs.   What does Orange Adolf have against Americans being employed? 

    Sturg – Also creepy, the scene in “The Bluebird” of an unborn Abe waiting to be born, but afraid because he knew what would happen to him.

  21. The best thing about living the way I do is I get to decide what to do. Tonight, is movie night. Movie night is most nights once it is dark. The feature film tonight is Smokey and the Bandit. Shot in the South, and showing off Mississippi the year after we left.

  22. Abe Lincoln vs Zombies

    You’re mixing-up “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” with “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”, actually

    …maybe that will be the sequel

  26. Camilla will be Queen Consort.  

    “And when, in the fullness of time, my son Charles becomes King, I know you will give him and his wife Camilla the same support that you have given me; and it is my sincere wish that, when that time comes, Camilla will be known as Queen Consort as she continues her own loyal service.”

    https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/05/uk/queen-elizabeth-ii-platinum-jubilee-accession-day-gbr-intl/index.html

    I know Craig was worried.

  28. Movie Review of the Week:
    Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies is a 2012 American action comedy horrorB movie directed by Richard Schenkman, with a screenplay by Schenkman based upon the story concept of Karl Hirsch and Lauren Proctor. Produced by The Asylum, and starring Bill Oberst Jr., the film was released direct-to-video on May 29, 2012,[1][3] following its May 28 theatrical premiere screening at the Telfair Museum of Art Jepson Center in Savannah, Georgia.[4][5]

  29. It’s not likely that I’ll ever see any of the Lincoln horror flicks as I never watch any kind of horror movies.   Ain’t nobody got time for that stuff.      

    And now back to autopsy and crime forensics. Real life is horror enough, eh?

    “The horrorrrrr”
    —Kurtz

  30. https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/04/world/china-russia-xi-putin-meeting-nato-intl/index.html

    “…Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping issued a call for NATO to halt further expansion during a meeting on the sidelines of the Beijing Olympics on Friday. The two leaders’ summit, held on the day of the Opening Ceremony for the Winter Olympics in China’s capital, marked a further step in what has become an increasingly close partnership between Beijing and Moscow, as relations with the West deteriorate for both.”

    “On Monday, China was the only member of the United Nations Security Council to vote alongside Russia to dismiss a council meeting called by the US to discuss Russia’s military build-up at the Ukrainian border — a call that Russia said amounted to the US “whipping up hysteria.”

  31. Movie Review of the Week:Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies

    Ah, excuse me.  The vampire one was a big-budget theatrical release, i enjoyed it, moderately:

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