Michael Hopcroft

You know he won't come back without Gracie, so it would be The Burns and Allen Movie, in which these whippersnappers get schooled on what real comedy looks like.
 
NT: Subtle signs you are not at all prepared for the Second Coming.

This is my greatest sense of unease as well - though I have my concerns that *North Korea* could secure them well enough.  I've never really been concerned that they'll nuke Seoul or Guam pre-emptively - though honestly I am not sure these days if we'd be 'allowed' to retaliate with military force (to disarm and disable, not invade) even if they did.
 
And once he's making multiple nukes per year (seriously, won't stop at one) selling a few might look appealing.
 
As for the 'false flag' suitcase nuke? In addition to what Ranxerox said don't every countries (or even places within a country) radioactive materials (enriched uranium) have their own unique signature because nobody shares the exact details of their enrichment process?
 
edit: Thank you, professor Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_forensics
 
Somebody would talk.  We live in a society where people who blow the lid off of government schemes or practices in any way shape or form get movies made about them.  To be the person who 'saved the world'? People recruited for this scheme would be climbing over each other to get to the media.

As much as I enjoy a game between Green Bay and Chicago, I'm willing to wait until Sunday to see it.
 
NFL teams should not be playing on four days' rest.

Petey the Stone Cold Penguin (Mascot of the sport of Curling)

You know he won't come back without Gracie, so it would be The Burns and Allen Movie, in which these whippersnappers get schooled on what real comedy looks like.
 
NT: Subtle signs you are not at all prepared for the Second Coming.

The nature of Trump's threat is that is was worded in a way that makes the cause more likely. It's like he's saying "I want you to attack us so we can annihilate you, because you deserve annihilation and i need an excuse."
 
Of course, he has no problem with South Korea and Japan dying in the process of his vendetta. Because hey, he's great and everyone should respect fear appreciate be amused by him.
 
We're all mad here.

Q: What do you need to be a good disaster prepper in the suburbs of San Francisco?
 
A: How dare you cite credible references and demand repeatable results!

For the first time a kneeldown during the National Anthem has taken place in major league baseball. Oakland A's catcher Bryce Maxwell took a knee before a home game in Oakland Saturday.
 
Maxwell is a military son. He was born on an army base in Germany. He is by no means a superstar, hitting .244 with three homeruns and 21 RBI in 71 major league games this season. And the A's seem to be backing him unequivocally.

Ask South Carolina sometime.

In other news, the latest GOP attempt to gut the ACA apparently does not have enough votes to be taken to the Senate floor. This attempt was especially dire, gutting Medicaid itself as well as the exchanges and other features of Obamacare. Since the temporary rule against filibusters ends on the 30th, this may have been the last chance to ram something through in this Congress.

In other news, the latest GOP attempt to gut the ACA apparently does not have enough votes to be taken to the Senate floor. This attempt was especially dire, gutting Medicaid itself as well as the exchanges and other features of Obamacare. Since the temporary rule against filibusters ends on the 30th, this may have been the last chance to ram something through in this Congress.

Trump's attempts at symbolic gestures have traditionally been ham-fisted and/or wrong-headed, and this was no exception. That this happened less than a week after he gutted FEMA, though, showcased a pretty serious error in judgment on his part.
 
Fortunately a lot of people are stepping forward to assist in Gulf Coast Texas even without the President egging them on. So I don;t think Harvey will define Trump's presidency the way Katrina defined Bush's. Presidents can't do as much in a natural disaster as people think -- generally speaking, they are best served to provide encouragement and then step aside and let the professionals do their jobs and the volunteers do theirs. Symbolism is really the best thing they can do. Unfortunately, Trump comes off (as usual) as someone who just doesn't give a ****.
 
Disaster is a great symbolic moment in any presidency. Barack Obama's response to the Sandy Hook shootings, for example, showcased what I view as his fundamental character as a man trying to make sense of the world without it costing him his humanity. That's hard to do as the most powerful single individual on the planet. If there are positive elements of Donald Trump's character, he really hasn't displayed them in a real sense. Sitting down in front of a camera in the White House and speaking to the American people essentially one-on-one is something he just doesn't do. He needs the crowd, He can't imagine making a statement without it.

Q: So, you finally got a date with that militant feminist you've been lusting after, did you?
 
A: All the gold in California.

Sometimes there is a place for anger. Historical perspective is all well and good, and certainly informs us, but in times like this we should be angry. Indeed, it is imperative that we be angry when our nature as a nation is under attack.
 
I did something today I have not done in decades. I wrote a letter to the President. He won't read it -- it's possible that nobody at all will read it -- but I had to get it out. He wimped out yesterday, while at the same time singing his own praises as if the point of the exercise was to make himself look good. I actually watched that speech, and my gall rose higher and higher with every word. I had the strong desire to rake him over the coals for it, so I did.
 
I chose my words carefully, but I did not mince words either.
 
Even his own party is calling him out over that speech.
 
There is a time for anger. There is a time for outrage. This is that time.

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."

I stopped reading the article when the writer mentioned the Los Angeles Rams. The Rams are in Saint Louis. So either this article is old or the reporter didn't bother to do any fact checking. If the latter is the case, I can't trust him. He probably made up the whole thing. Who knows what other crazy things he might say. I bet he thinks the Chargers are in L.A. too.

There are different strains of American Conservatism (and, for that matter, American Liberalism). The magazines cited above represent a more intellectual approach (I saw William J. Buckley speak once, when I was on college. Man did he have a huge vocabulary.), while Fox and Breitbart (from what I've heard, as I've never read Breitbart) act out of a great distrust of intellectialism even on the Right. Nuance is weakness -- you are either right or wrong with no middle ground.
 
That is the very definition of alt-right. It makes no allowances for deviation from a fixed ideological norm that never changes.

"Cocaine" is actually a cover of a song written and recorded by by J.J. Cale a year before Clapton made it famous.

Season 1 Episode 3 of Wild Wild West ("The Night the Wizard Shook the Earth").
 
The first appearance of Dr. Loveless.

So many people are watching the game on TV or in sports bars that nobody comes to the stadium. And the league doesn't care.

Tangent which I will drop after this post: the change is not to the name but to the Romanization. Putting Chinese into Roman letters as opposed to their own script is a challenge because, like in any other language, the pronunciation is difficult to transfer. Beijung is closer to how the Chinese have always pronounced it. The city was referred to by Westerners as Peiping during the Nationalist era (where the capital had been moved to Nanking to the south) but that didn't last very long (and neither did the Nationalists). I suspect most of the residents of the city still called it Beijing.
 
Beijing is not a perfect Romanization, but it's a better one.

In happier news, tennis great Serena Williams has given birth to her first child, a baby girl. The new mother plans to return to tennis in November. Her sister Venus is having a great year in her absence, advancing today to the fourth round of the U.S. Open in New York City.

Trump loves rallies more than anything else in the world. Large crowds of people cheering for him excites him far more than preparing a budget or phoning a senator who probably despises him in order to secure a vote on his latest pet project.
 
He is convinced the people love him, and that's all that matters.