Make A Joyful Noise

After all the shouting and pain and bloodshed that go hand in hand with religion and the politics that comes with religion, I'm always left with these three things:

One is my atheism - and thank god for that.

Another one is that eventually, we get to Christmas, where we find some amazing and glorious music to help us process all the silly (and often dangerous) weirdness that goes on in our minds.

The third is a wish - that we could just stick to the art, and learn how to skip all that other shit.

Sometimes it's hard not to see winter as bleak and harsh and bereft of anything hopeful, even knowing it's just part of the continuing cycle of our lives. But if we hold each other in the warmth of our hearts, we're not alone - and we can welcome a long and lustrous season waiting for spring.

Merry Christmas, everybody.

Making for home

Not A Hipster Was Swingin'

Today's Tweet

Shove your incivility.

Listen to this idiot. pic.twitter.com/zG04hSXET6

— Tomthunkit™ (@TomthunkitsMind) December 23, 2018

Great Line

Got done Christmas shopping, leaving the dollar store, I glanced over and I saw Chuck Norris, face down in a pool of his own blood. 

I helped him to his feet, I blurted out “ Chuck, what happened?!” He turned, spit out a tooth, looked into my soul and said one word... “Ginsburg”

-- Christopher Titus

ProLeftPod

• No "Best Of" nonsense here, guys - a fresh episode every Friday, no matter what.
• Losing DumFux News
• Christmas got its start with a mad king doing some really scary shit
• Cue David Brooks
• Gender Neutral Gingerbread Persons

It's Christmas, ya cheap bastid - send 'em a little love

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A Facebook Share

Let's just make some happy little hairs right about here.

Today's Tweet

And if history is any guide, he'll set fire to the whole world trying to avoid doing what's right.

It’s hard to believe, given Trump’s decades of criminality, his malignancy is so extreme he actually imagined he could get away with it on the biggest stage in the world. His hubris, his narcissism, his utter amorality & greed will finally do him in & destroy everything he’s got.

— Steven Beschloss (@StevenBeschloss) December 20, 2018

Dude - What's Up With Your Hair?

In case you weren't feeling sufficiently freaked-out lately.

(BTW, this is BuzzFeed, so we recommend grains of salt)

Anthony Courmier and Jason Leopold, BuzzFeed:

US Treasury Department officials used a Gmail back channel with the Russian government as the Kremlin sought sensitive financial information on its enemies in America and across the globe, according to documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News.

The extraordinary unofficial line of communication arose in the final year of the Obama administration — in the midst of what multiple US intelligence agencies have said was a secret campaign by the Kremlin to interfere in the US election. Russian agents ostensibly trying to track ISIS instead pressed their American counterparts for private financial documents on at least two dozen dissidents, academics, private investigators, and American citizens.

Most startlingly, Russia requested sensitive documents on Dirk, Edward, and Daniel Ziff, billionaire investors who had run afoul of the Kremlin. That request was made weeks before a Russian lawyer showed up at Trump Tower offering top campaign aides “dirt” on Hillary Clinton — including her supposed connection to the Ziff brothers.

- and -

In an astonishing departure from protocol, documents show that at the same time the requests were being made, Treasury officials were using their government email accounts to send messages back and forth with a network of private Hotmail and Gmail accounts set up by the Russians, rather than communicating through the secure network usually used to exchange information with other countries.

Analysts at an elite agency within Treasury first warned supervisors in 2016 that the Russians were “manipulating the system” to conduct “fishing expeditions.” And they raised fears that the Treasury’s internal systems could be compromised by viruses contained in emails from the unofficial Russian accounts. But staff continued using the Gmail back channel into 2017, despite repeated internal warnings that Russia could be trawling for sensitive financial records — including Social Security and bank account numbers — to spy on, endanger, or recruit targets in the West.

Every time we turn around, there's another gasoline fire.

About all I can think of to do is to try to be aware of as much as possible, so I can formulate a few options, and be as ready as I can be to make some judgment as to what I need to do in response to whatever unfolds on any given day.

And as I read that last sentence to myself, I understand a little more about just how fucked up all of this has gotten.

I have conversations with myself, and I keep coming back to: "Y'know, I'm pretty good at thinking my way thru a lot of this shit, but I don't know what the fuck is going on anymore".

I do know this much: None of this can even be addressed until we start the removal of the Cult45 infestation.

This shit's gotta stop.

Today's Today

Today is Frank Zappa's birthday, marking the end of Zappadan; a day of reflection and celebration and feasting - and over-indulgence, if that's your gig.

Today's Parody

Just a little quickie from Rocky Mountain Mike: