Tuesday, December 31, 2019
On The Eve Of 2020
Let's skip the 2019 retrospectives
and go straight to kickin' some GOP ass in 2020
Monday, December 30, 2019
I Gotcher Deep State Right Here
Classic projection - "The deep state is countervailing your heroic freedom-loving president's heroic effort to heroically do the heroic things that heroes such as he does for the patriotic glory of our nation and the purity of our heroic American essence."
The Deep State (as always) is comprised of sycophants, and other functionaries, who're more or less invisible, which renders them unaccountable politically, and so craven that all they care about is gaining power, and then wielding it for nearly the sole purpose of staying in power - seeing the democratic processes intended to check their craven instincts as silly little roadblocks, and considering the sense of honor necessary to observe and uphold the system of checks and balances as weakness instead of strength.
It's a very old story.
NYT via WaPo:
Among the story’s key points:
"Michael Duffey? I don't know him - you'll have to ask Mick Mulvaney about all that..."
What we have is a POTUS - a stable genius and brilliant business guy - a guy so awesomely awesome and amazing at his job that he doesn't know who works for him or what the fuck it is we're paying them to do.
It's a very old story.
NYT via WaPo:
Among the story’s key points:
- As early as June, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney worked to execute the freeze for Trump, and a top aide to Mulvaney — Robert Blair — worried it would fuel the narrative that Trump was tacitly aiding Russia.
- Internal opposition was more forceful than previously known. The Pentagon pushed for the money for months. Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and then-national security adviser John Bolton privately urged Trump to understand that freezing the aid was not in our national interest.
- Trump was unmoved, citing Ukraine’s “corruption.” We now know Trump actually wanted Ukraine to announce sham investigations absolving Russia of 2016 electoral sabotage and smearing potential 2020 opponent Joe Biden. The Times report reveals that top Trump officials did not think that ostensibly combating Ukrainian “corruption” (which wasn’t even Trump’s real aim) was in our interests.
- Lawyers at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) worked to develop a far-fetched legal argument that Trump could exercise commander-in-chief authority to override Congress’ appropriation of the aid, to get around the law precluding Trump from freezing it.
- Michael Duffey, a political appointee at OMB, tried to get the Pentagon to assume responsibility for getting the aid released, to deflect blame away from the White House for its own role in blocking it. This led a Pentagon official to pronounce herself “speechless.”
- Duffey froze the aid with highly unusual bureaucratic tactics, refused to tell Pentagon officials why Trump wanted it withheld and instructed them to keep this “closely held.” (Some of this had already been reported, but in narrative context it becomes far more damning.)
"Michael Duffey? I don't know him - you'll have to ask Mick Mulvaney about all that..."
What we have is a POTUS - a stable genius and brilliant business guy - a guy so awesomely awesome and amazing at his job that he doesn't know who works for him or what the fuck it is we're paying them to do.
Sunday, December 29, 2019
Today's Benediction
May god bless you with discomfort
at easy answers, half-truths and superficial relationships,
so that you may live deep within your heart.
May god bless you with anger
at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people,
so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.
And may god bless you with enough foolishness
to believe you can make a difference in the world; to do what others claim can't be done;
to bring justice and kindness to all our children and the poor.
Saturday, December 28, 2019
Weird News
...is, unfortunately, not all that weird anymore.
Florida Post:
Farmers in southern Somalia are shooting at huge swarms of locusts with heavy machine guns in a desperate attempt to save their crops, according to media affiliated to the jihadist group Al-Shabaab.
According to the group’s media, insects that have infested farmland around the southwestern town of Tiyeglow, an Al-Shabaab stronghold, are being shot at with a PKM rifle — a machine gun version of the Russian Kalashnikov.
The news comes as the country experiences its largest locust infestation for 25 years. Since July, swarms of Desert Locusts from nearby Yemen have invaded vast swathes of the Horn of Africa.
A typical swarm can contain up to 150 million insects per square kilometre. Each locust can grow up to 4.3 inches long and travel up to 95 miles a day depending on the wind. Every day, an average swarm can consume the equivalent of a year’s worth of food for 2,500 people.
According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the locusts have already destroyed 70,000 hectares (175,000 acres) of farmland in Somalia and neighbouring Ethiopia.
Florida Post:
Farmers in southern Somalia are shooting at huge swarms of locusts with heavy machine guns in a desperate attempt to save their crops, according to media affiliated to the jihadist group Al-Shabaab.
According to the group’s media, insects that have infested farmland around the southwestern town of Tiyeglow, an Al-Shabaab stronghold, are being shot at with a PKM rifle — a machine gun version of the Russian Kalashnikov.
The news comes as the country experiences its largest locust infestation for 25 years. Since July, swarms of Desert Locusts from nearby Yemen have invaded vast swathes of the Horn of Africa.
A typical swarm can contain up to 150 million insects per square kilometre. Each locust can grow up to 4.3 inches long and travel up to 95 miles a day depending on the wind. Every day, an average swarm can consume the equivalent of a year’s worth of food for 2,500 people.
According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the locusts have already destroyed 70,000 hectares (175,000 acres) of farmland in Somalia and neighbouring Ethiopia.
Maybe the weird thing is that Florida finds this shit weird.
But also, the weird thing is that east African ammosexuals are trying to solve the locust problem with guns, and the American ammosexuals seem not to find any of it weird at all - not the shooting of locust swarms, not the locust swarms themselves, and not the possible connection to environmental causes of the locust swarms.
Friday, December 27, 2019
Fire Chuck Todd
We can hope enough people are finally getting pretty fucking sick of the bullshit that passes for reportage on the "news shows".
Press Poodles are being put on notice - kinda - as "Both Sides Don't" starts to sink in and take hold in our brains.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Jay Rosen, PressThink:
‘Round midnight on Christmas eve, Rolling Stone posted a short interview with Chuck Todd, host of “the longest running show on television,” NBC’s Meet the Press.
Its contents were explosive, embarrassing, enraging, and just plain weird.
Three years after Kellyanne Conway introduced the doctrine of “alternative facts” on his own program, a light went on for Chuck Todd. Republican strategy, he now realized, was to make stuff up, spread it on social media, repeat it in your answers to journalists — even when you know it’s a lie with crumbs of truth mixed in — and then convert whatever controversy arises into go-get-em points with the base, while pocketing for the party a juicy dividend: additional mistrust of the news media to help insulate President Trump among loyalists when his increasingly brazen actions are reported as news.
- and -
The ostensible purpose of the Rolling Stone interview was to promote a special edition of Meet the Press on December 29 that will focus on the weaponization of disinformation. But its effect is to bring MTP — and by extension similar shows — into epistemological crisis. With Todd’s confessions the mask has come off. It could have come off a long time ago, but the anchors, producers, guests, advertisers and to an unknown degree the remaining viewers colluded in an act of make believe that lurched along until now. One way to say it: They agreed to pretend that Conway’s threatening phrase, “alternative facts” was just hyberbole, the kind of inflammatory moment that makes for viral clips and partisan bickering. More silly than it was ominous.
In reality she had made a grave announcement. The nature of the Trump government would be propagandistic. And as Garry Kasparov observes for us, “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” This exhaustion, this annihilation were on their way to the Sunday shows, and to all interactions with journalists. That is what Kellyanne Conway was saying that day on Meet the Press. But the people who run the show chose not to believe it.
Press Poodles are being put on notice - kinda - as "Both Sides Don't" starts to sink in and take hold in our brains.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
-- Upton Sinclair
Jay Rosen, PressThink:
‘Round midnight on Christmas eve, Rolling Stone posted a short interview with Chuck Todd, host of “the longest running show on television,” NBC’s Meet the Press.
Its contents were explosive, embarrassing, enraging, and just plain weird.
Three years after Kellyanne Conway introduced the doctrine of “alternative facts” on his own program, a light went on for Chuck Todd. Republican strategy, he now realized, was to make stuff up, spread it on social media, repeat it in your answers to journalists — even when you know it’s a lie with crumbs of truth mixed in — and then convert whatever controversy arises into go-get-em points with the base, while pocketing for the party a juicy dividend: additional mistrust of the news media to help insulate President Trump among loyalists when his increasingly brazen actions are reported as news.
- and -
The ostensible purpose of the Rolling Stone interview was to promote a special edition of Meet the Press on December 29 that will focus on the weaponization of disinformation. But its effect is to bring MTP — and by extension similar shows — into epistemological crisis. With Todd’s confessions the mask has come off. It could have come off a long time ago, but the anchors, producers, guests, advertisers and to an unknown degree the remaining viewers colluded in an act of make believe that lurched along until now. One way to say it: They agreed to pretend that Conway’s threatening phrase, “alternative facts” was just hyberbole, the kind of inflammatory moment that makes for viral clips and partisan bickering. More silly than it was ominous.
In reality she had made a grave announcement. The nature of the Trump government would be propagandistic. And as Garry Kasparov observes for us, “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” This exhaustion, this annihilation were on their way to the Sunday shows, and to all interactions with journalists. That is what Kellyanne Conway was saying that day on Meet the Press. But the people who run the show chose not to believe it.
Question: What happens if The Press boycotts Cult45? They should still report on whatever is said, but they don't have to play the video recorded of everything that spills out of the pie holes of the stooges being paid to spill it. And they don't have to book KellyAnne and Stephanie and Ronna - or Lindsey Graham or Ron Johnson or the other defenders of POTUS - on their shows, especially when 45* insists on taking it directly to the American public.
I don't pretend to know exactly what has to change, or how it can be changed for the better, but the way this shit gets covered by the press has to change.
I know we've been losing, and it seems like maybe we're starting to get a handle on it, but shit's gotta change or we could easily fall right back into the old pattern again.
Thursday, December 26, 2019
Tuesday, December 24, 2019
Monday, December 23, 2019
Say It The Way Ya Wanna Say It
Pretty much my fave Red vs Blue myth is the one where Obama practically outlawed saying Merry Christmas, and that the librul hordes would rain down all manner of horribleness upon you if you dared utter the forbidden shibboleth.
TRUMP: "They were trying to take Christmas out of Christmas"— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) December 23, 2019
REALITY: HERE'S OBAMA SAYING "MERRY CHRISTMAS" EVERY SINGLE YEAR (cc: @BillHagertyTN @realDonaldTrump) pic.twitter.com/2xXjXnOKnO
So, to all my "conservative" DumFux News friends, let me close with these words - spoken in the spirit of love and charity:
GO FUCK YOURSELVES WITH IT
- and -
Merry Christmas bitches!
Christmas Pix
May your days be merry and bright
And may all your Christmases be appropriately diverse, and non-triggering, and relaxed and groovy.
And may all your Christmases be appropriately diverse, and non-triggering, and relaxed and groovy.
click
😎☟☯
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