Stroll: Agelessness

Not the same as childishness.
Just sayin'.

This song has that late night in the off-campus apartment on Friday night feeling to it.

Pretty, Pretty, Pretty, Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Girls…
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How does a president launch a nuclear attack? WaPo says he just gives an order.

That's it? There's no sobriety test or anything? He just says "I don't like kim chi, he's toast" or something like that?

You'd think that launching nuclear armaments would be a little more difficult than getting into Princeton. At least an essay or something.

Plus, there's that petition signed by 60000 mental health professionals that say Trump is mentally ill. Leaving the nuclear football around him is the equivalent of letting a four year old play with the gun he found in daddy's backpack.

Over at Political Gabfest, Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson and Jamelle Bouie ponder a much more realistic but just as unsettling scenario: North Korea launches its missiles against South Korea and calls Trump's bluff.

Can I just say how morally irresponsible it is for one of the deadliest countries in the world to put its trust in a clearly unstable man and then insist there is nothing that can be done about it if that man decides to annihilate a nation because of some 36 word oath he took?

We have exposed our secret American craziness for all the world to see. We've been sticking our landings by sheer luck for 240 years. The optics are pretty bad here. We can't put it back in the bottle. There is likely no Jaime Lannister. We're like that KLM pilot on Tenerife who was hungry and cranky and wanted to get home and whom no one dared question.

We are stupid fucks with nukes.

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Following up on James Damore's manifesto that got him fired from Google this week, assistant professor of history, Maria Hicks, has a post at The Conversation about "brogrammer" culture in tech. Jamelle Bouie, in the Gabfest podcast mentioned above, boiled down the issue succinctly from a POC point of view. The right and entrenched privileged class has a habit of wanting to refresh the conversation about whether stereotypes are genetically based. They aren't. We've got the studies to prove it. But just bringing it up keeps the stereotypes alive. Even when their arguments are wrong, they can do great damage. Those of us on the receiving end spend a lot more energy defending and proving ourselves. The purpose of debating these points is not as high minded as it sounds. And Damore surely knows this.

Everyone should be evaluated on their abilities as individuals and given opportunities to do their best work. Can anyone truly argue with that? If you just happen to do well in math and computer science and can code like a demon, what difference does it make if you have lady parts? Presumably, google hired its female software engineers using the same criteria as Damore.

The White males should stop acting like the rest of us are mindless zombies banging on the doors to let us in so we can eat their brains.

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IBW found this helpful PSA poster: