Today's Tweet

Republicans act like they're invisible or something. Like we can't see the shit they try to pull.

Or maybe it's just that they know the rubes will swallow every little turd that floats by, and guys like Nunes has begun to swallow his own turds(?)

"If I say it out loud, the rubes believe it, so maybe if I say it out loud it's magically true."(?)

An indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani is willing to tell Congress about meetings in Vienna between Devin Nunes and a former Ukrainian prosecutor. As @VickyPJWard tells @ChrisCuomo, the purpose of the meetings was to discuss digging up dirt on Joe Biden.https://t.co/gT7O3mdbX7 pic.twitter.com/36zQipJ9vO

— Cuomo Prime Time (@CuomoPrimeTime) November 23, 2019

OK, Boomer

Here's a great little treatise chock full of insight.

From the comments:

Self care is also not arguing with people who are committed to misunderstanding you.

There are big problems with this kind of thing, of course, and they grow out of an evolutionary feature in our firmware - Pattern Seeking.

A million years ago, we had to start with sorting the world into easily recognizable binary chunks: The stuff that helps us versus the stuff that hurts us.

But then we had to figure out the duality thing.

• Fire helps us by keeping us warm and making our food easier to digest, but it can kill us too
• We have to have water to drink and to grow the plants we need to eat, but we can drown in it, and that's where the crocodiles live
• A flint knife is an excellent tool for acquiring and processing food, as well as being a deadly weapon that avails us the means to murder each other.

We dearly love sorting things. Oh how we do love it so.

But just as with water and fire and tools, the need to sort, in and of itself, can be both helpful and harmful.

We sort people according to physical traits, and we get racism
We sort people according to spiritual belief, and we get religious wars and genocide
We sort people according to their wealth, and we get class struggles and bloody revolution

So none of this is particularly new, but I need to write it down - to reiterate it to myself before it slips away.

Fast rewind to the early 20th century, when Bernays taps into Freudian concepts in order to synthesize a new kind of marketing, which of course turns out to be both a good tool to get the word out to people about good things, and an excellent weapon to divide and conquer.

A short course:

A bit longer:

And with each advancement in Mass Media, we've seen an amplifying effect of both the positive and the negative aspects of communications vis-à-vis news, advertising and propaganda.

What's new for me is the thought that so-called Artificial Intelligence (an oxymoron if ever there was one) has grown up so quickly and become so pervasive that the bad guys can run their scams in stealth mode so that by the time most of us become aware of what's being done to us, we figure it's too late to do anything about it.

(the 2016 election comes to mind - duh)

Anyway, Blunty's video popped a couple things into my brain.

First is the marketing/propaganda stuff: the slicing and dicing of demographics info to the point where micro-targeting gets so fucking granular as to make it possible to generate very specific hot-button items at very specific, and ever smaller sectors of the populace.

Second - growing out of the first (as usual) - is that there is practically no such thing as "shared experience" on any large scale that isn't being manufactured and custom fit to the biases that have also been manufactured and custom fit to us.

Divide-n-Conquer works. 

The practitioners are very good at it, and getting better as we go along.

for good or ill

the world is 

what we make it

Today's Oy

At the hearing yesterday:

Pretty sure that sign actually means Schiff always follows the rules - doesn't it?

So I guess that's why the Repubs are always so pissed off(?)

Yeah, we can fuck that up.

Of course we can fuck that up.

We're the GOP.

It's Gonna Take A Dead Hooker

...but don't count on it - Nicolle Wallace, MSNBC:



"Shot four times in the back with a bolt-action 30.06? An obvious suicide - the facts are in." --Jim Jordan

Today's Tweet

The weird flipflop evolution thing that Lindsey Graham has gone through is one of the more intriguing stories of the Cult45 era.

How he went from the mavericky McCain entourage to the ass-kisser he is now will be a mystery that could easily make some history major's career.

Today I began an investigation into the Bidens. Did the Biden's do anything wrong? NO. Am I doing this to make @realDonaldTrump look innocent? YES. WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT WATCH THE VIDEO BELOW!! IT WILL MAKE ME LOOK LIKE A MONSTER... pic.twitter.com/ZBEe80o4zZ

— Lindsey Graham’s “Fake” Conscience (@LGsConscience) November 22, 2019

A Score Card

CREW - Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington

Go to the CREW website, hover over the different sections, and be astounded at the depth and the breadth of what this "administration" is about - even when you stop to see that the thing is only focused on the Trump part of it, and doesn't include the rest of Cult45.

Another Strong Close

Adam Schiff, Chair, House Intelligence Committee

We'll see what we see, but I still won't get my hopes up too high.

Republicans aren't coming around - not yet - not publicly. And the conventional wisdom is that they won't cut 45* loose until the political cost of staying with him becomes too great and too obvious for them to bear. Duh.

Our government is degenerate.

It's a little weird to think that way about the US. There's always an element of Daddy State philosophy in government. And always there are people who believe government is there to force us all into a particular way of thinking - not just the basics of knowing our rights and respecting each other's rights, but to use the full weight of the threat of deadly force to make people conform to the arbitrary musings of doctrinaires rather than trying to nail down a few guiding principles that give us a chance to live up to our stated goal of forming a more perfect union.

The good news is that I think we're starting to bend history's arc back towards justice.

The bad news is that we haven't passed thru this very dangerous crossroads yet.

And just to continue this little metaphor mashup - when you're going through hell, keep going.

Today's Tweet

What had to be said. And what too many of us have been thinking Schiff wouldn't say.

This is a pretty good close.

Here's that closing statement from Schiff, via ABC. It's worth a watch.

"My Republicans colleagues, all they seem to be upset about with this is not that the president sought an investigation of his political rival ... Their objection is he got caught."pic.twitter.com/M8r8JLrH61

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) November 20, 2019

Today's Pix

click

👁⬇︎👁

Today's Tweet

The only shot Repubs have is to turn the hearings it into something they're not.

Replublicans readying for today's impeachment hearings 🐾💕 pic.twitter.com/01KIwZeEt1

— Jay Arnold 🏳️‍🌈 (@JadedCreative) November 19, 2019