So, electric kettles. Let me see if I can't convert some other white US-born people over.

Here are some reasons:

1. You can set specific temperatures, not just heat things to a boil. Get closer to the ideal temperature for your tea, spend less time waiting for it to cool. 2. If you need boiling water to pour into or over something, not just like a single serving for instant whatever, you've got it in a nice kettle with a spout and an insulated handle.

Twitter's specific policy on Dehumanizing Speech is better than I had feared; it's more specific, covering only comparisons to animals (vermin, pests) or tools for a specific purpose. You can give feedback here. Mine focused on implementation. blog.twitter.com/official/en_us… The Dehumanizing Speech policy being specific is important because if (let's dream big here) it is enforced as written, you can avoid getting suspended for talking about TERFs by saying their beliefs are garbage or their actions are garbage.

For the record, I do hope Brett Kavanaugh's life is ruined. I hope his marriage has been irreparably strained. I hope his social life is in the toilet. I hope he feels no joy at his win. I hope he only stops waiting for the other shoe to fall when it does, like a guillotine blade My ~*preference*~ would be that he suffer some sort of institutional consequences, even if it was merely not being confirmed to a lifetime position on the highest court in the land, where he will have power over millions.

But the right decided that's off the table.

Well, @RadioFreeTom thinks saying "No problem." implies there's a problem so forgive me if I'm not crowning him a king of situational analysis. What he's calling Trump's "rhetorical excess" is largely projection. The idea that we win by *not* pointing out what they're doing...

https://twitter.com/livewithoutego/status/1048990336322818048

...just gives Trump and his party the full benefit of that projection, in that they get to smear their opponents while being insulated from accurate accusations. We've been ceding control of the narrative to them for decades now and it hasn't worked.

We've got GOP voters talking about drinking liberal tears with their beers, we've got a GOP president lying his backside off to his rally and then telling Jeanine Pirro he wants to hold women "liable" for talking about rapes... I don't see the centrists asking them to be civil? Isn't it weird how absolutely no pundit wrote an editorial saying that Lindsey Graham's fire and brimstone sermon isn't going to win over the middle? Isn't it strange that no one tells Chuck Grassley that his angry interruptions are going to hurt his party?

So let me tell you another reason we need to not back down, not sit down, not be quiet: coward that he is, Donald Trump is at his most dangerous when he feels like he's on top of the world. The horse race headlines are saying that Donald Trump had his best day as president, and I'm sure he felt it. He just came through a knock-down, drag-out fight and won a battle that people had been telling him to drop for weeks, so right now no one can tell him anything.

So the following things, as I see them are true:
1. Kavanaugh probably gets confirmed today.
2. Nothing we do is likely to stop this.
3. We should fight on anyway. There are two ways to respond to a crushing defeat, two ways to respond to a gross injustice, and the right and the establishment in general have spent our entire lives coaching us carefully towards one of them -- despair, resignation -- and away from another one: anger, rage.

Collins really sounds like a yes.

Get ready to unleash heck. It really sounds like she's acting as though she only has to explain her vote on the grounds of protecting Roe v. Wade, and is treating the rest as a bunch of salacious rumormongering by "special interest groups".

Anything could happen and pressure on everyone will be felt by everyone else, but a lot does ride on Collins. The field narrows if she announces a stand at 3 as expected.

https://twitter.com/mkraju/status/1048261410155843585

If Collins says she's a yes, keep calling, protesting, making noise. Nothing is official until it is voted, and the momentum will need to be sustained to become productive anger if they ram him through.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door...

https://twitter.com/newscientist/status/1047856406341320706

I thought the part at the beginning where it's moving was the worst part but then I watched it and somehow EVERY PART OF THIS VIDEO IS THE WORST PART OF THIS VIDEO

Here's the thing about nobody telling Trump he has toilet paper stuck to his shoe: do you think that brittle little man is going to thank you, if you pointed it out? Do you think he'd take that as a mark of your respect for him? In Trump's world, mistakes are signs of weakness. I guarantee you that everybody close to him has seen him chewing someone's head off for pointing out that his fly is down or that he missed a button or whatever, because that's a dominance move in his head.

Let me give you a slogan for November:

"We defy augury."

Likely voters. Polls. Projections. Forget all that. Something is happening here, now, in this moment that no one can account for, because it comes from pain and anger that have never been counted. People who didn't count. Voter turnout was up for the primaries, way up for a midterm year, especially way up on the Democrat side. No one counted on that. Even people who thought we'd see a surge relative to what they'd otherwise expect, didn't expect the size of it.

So, just as a heads up: the White House announced at 2:30 in the morning, a very normal time for very normal announcements, that the FBI have completed their interview and "not corroborated" any sexual assault allegations. The Senate GOP leadership have announced that in the next day there will be plenty of time for every Senator to view and be briefed on the single copy of the report, which is kept locked in a safe, so they can vote on Friday.

Pleased to note that putting my phone in Do Not Disturb mode worked for suppressing the sound and vibration from the emergency alert test. Calling the nationwide FEMA alert system "Presidential Alert" has the unfortunate effect of tying its usefulness/effectiveness to the popularity of the current president. People would be annoyed but less annoyed if it was just "The Wireless Emergency Alert".

Here's why you should vote for your Democratic Senator to be re-elected, even if they suck, even if they've coddled Trump, even if they don't share your principles or seem to have any of their own:

You aren't voting for Senators. You're voting for control of the agenda by proxy. Because the GOP holds a *teeny* majority in the Senate, they have leadership of every committee like the Judiciary Committee. Grassley had almost absolute power to set ground rules, to decide who and what gets heard, and to talk as much as he wanted during others' 5 minute turns.

So I want to talk about something a bit, and I apologize but as I fear I'm getting sick I am on limited caffeine and no alcohol, so this might be less cogent than normal. There was a ~*heartwarming*~ story going around about how a man's adult children surprised him by finding the beloved car he had sold for cancer treatments and buying it back from another man, also paying for cancer treatments.

Hey, if you're being mindful that "Indian Princess" Halloween costumes are sexualizing a population that is highly vulnerable to sexual violence when they're not erased as extinct or mythical, here's another reminder:

"Circling the wagons" is a racist metaphor. There is no historical dispute on the fact that it's a racist metaphor. Even if no wagons were actually circled for any reason. It's invoked in modern English in reference to a Hollywood trope.

https://twitter.com/jenniferemorrow/status/1046948544823943168

Kavanaugh's anger is very sincere because this is in fact deeply unfair to him, as he understands the concept of fairness. Which is:

1. Life is a game.
2. Those who do well in life get ahead.
3. So those who are ahead have done well.

If the rules change, that's not fair. When he got plastered in high school and college and did whatever he wanted, his understanding of the rules is, this was allowed. Being drunk would excuse whatever his privilege and the norms of his social circle didn't. That was the rules.

Re: Gaming.

I think a healthy, sustainable gaming industry would have to move away from the AAA model and understand you can't have it all. You can't have a vast world and a branching story or designed sandbox and ever more gorgeously photorealistic/super-realistic graphics... ...and deep gameplay mechanics and an ongoing series with regular installments that each outdo the last one.

Half-Life 2 tried for a model where we'd get episodic sequels made using the same game engine, same assets, etc. And I think it could have worked.

Alternate theory: The modern GOP has escalated its tactics to the point where it *cannot* think about the implications of its actions. All their plans proceed from the assumption they will always be in power, and when possible, reinforce that possibility. It's all or nothing now.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1046818616056922112

Grover Norquist articulated the GOP strategy of perpetual rule as: when the GOP is in power, do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. When the GOP is out of power, make it impossible for the opposition to govern. (Practiced against Clinton, perfected against Obama).

OKAY. SO.

One thing that I think has been under-considered is all the ways in which Kavanaugh's liabilities are a plus in Trump's book. By pitching the fight over Kavanaugh's confirmation as a partisan slugfest, Trump is mainstreaming this kind of misogyny.

https://twitter.com/LisPower1/status/1046792057359093760

The kind of fratbro "antics" that Kavanaugh and Judge perpetrated are being discussed in public and *defended* as not being unusual, remarkable, or consequential by any GOP who wants to follow the party or the base.