Of Our Fathers

Jeff Sessions is not his father. But like the man said - the bag never falls very far from the douche.

hat tip = @juliaioffe

Sunday's Question

Of all the sins requiring Death By Stoning, why did god leave Rape off the list?

A "Joke"

🚹 Ban Muslims!

🚺 Ban men! 

🚹 Uh - there's like 3.5 billion men?

🚺 And 1.6 billion Muslims - same diff

🚹 But terrorists are mostly Muslims

🚺 And mostly men

🚹 That's dumb

🚺 I'll say

hat tip = FB bud Linda M-M

Trae Crowder

Thanks, Obama

If His Lips Are Moving

AlterNet:

Donald Trump is a prolific liar. That’s neither an opinion nor a criticism, but a statement of scientific fact. In the midst of the presidential campaign, Politico analyzed a few hours of Trump’s speeches and found he lied once every five minutes on average.

PolitiFact gave Trump its Lie of the Year Award for 2015, and has since determined that only 15 percent of Trump’s words are true or even mostly true. Toronto Star journalist Daniel Dale, who fact-checked Trump for 33 days and found he told as many as 25 lies in a 24-hour period (excluding debates, when he crammed up to 34 lies into 90 minutes), wrote that Trump “lies strategically. He lies pointlessly. He lies about important things and meaningless things. Above all, he lies frequently.” Trump lies so effortlessly and consistently that the Washington Post created a plug-in that, lacking the human tendency to grow fatigued, fact-checks Trump’s lie-filled tweets in real time.

Strategic lying. Trump's lies are in fact habitual at this point, but that's only because he's had lotsa practice at lying by design. Because it works.

Coupla things:

I can say one thing to you and another thing to the next guy and then I can play those two positions against each other from the middle.  I stand to get something from you and/or something from him, and I can "come clean" or double down or go a completely different way - none of which matters because I'm hedging my positions to the point where I've off-loaded almost all of my risk onto somebody else so I'll "win" something regardless of how anything turns out - I am far less concerned with how it turns out than I am with positioning myself to benefit no matter the outcome.

And politically, by the time (eg) The Libtards fact-check it, the bullshit is already "out there" and we're all on to something else, and that's all yesterday's news and on and on and on.

Once you've surrendered your silly girly-man concerns over doing what's right, you'll never have to be wrong again.

...a Moral Flexibility that goes beyond most people.

It Begins

...or more accurately, it continues - and accelerates.

Union For Concerned Scientists:

The increasingly reckless House of Representatives, caught up in a public mutiny, may have walked back its abandonment of congressional ethics. But it simultaneously took several other steps that will enable corruption and greatly expand political influence over the work of experts at NASA, NOAA, EPA, and other science agencies, compromising their ability to serve the public interest.

This week, the House made significant changes to the rules under which it operates. First and foremost is the Holman rule, resurrected from the 1870s, just at the end of Reconstruction. This rule allows Congress, through spending bills, to target specific initiatives and reduce the salaries of individual federal employees whose work they find irksome to $1.

Does your research suggest a chemical company that happens to be located in the district of a powerful member of Congress is responsible for environmental contamination? You could be on that list.

So, Repubs are saying they'll keep science from becoming politicized by subjecting scientists to political pressures and ideological tests.

OK and away we go.

Today's GIF

When you realize Trump will be able to interrupt TV programming whenever he wants because he thinks you should know that Alec Baldwin is being mean to him again.

hat tip = @goldengateblond

Today's Tweet

Hillary was so flawed Putin, Trump, Wikileaks, Comey, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein had to join forces just to keep her under 70 million votes

— Boney Hurdle (@eclecticbrotha) January 7, 2017

Today's Pix

Today's Podcast

A highlight: 
At about 43:00, BlueGal reviews an article on Healthcare spending that has just about everything I need to know about Consumer Behavior. ie: in an effort to get people to be more thoughtful and circumspect in how they spend their healthcare dollar, a company raised their deductible (so people had "skin in the game" I assume). But instead of shopping around for better doctors and/or better deals, people just cut back on going to their doctors - eg: they stopped getting the colonoscopies that prevent ass cancer because they didn't go to their doctors for regular checkups so they weren't properly informed and reminded. etc etc etc.



And Bible Bitch is pretty good again this week.

The Professional Left

Today's Quote

This applies to not a few revolutionaries and militarists and other apostles of violence. They are actuated, usually without their knowledge, by hatred; the destruction of what they hate is their real purpose, and they are comparatively indifferent to the question of what is to come after it.

--Bertrand Russell

Today's Tweet

Trump seems even more terrifyingly uninformed when you read his words as text. Here is the ONLY thing he’s ever said about the war in Yemen: pic.twitter.com/qyP7xyXDjV

— Jonathan Riley (@JonRiley7) January 6, 2017

Somethin' wrong with that guy.

Late Breaking Keith

NEW: The video to send to that person in your life who is still supporting @realDonaldTrump. There is no yelling. pic.twitter.com/8ADyBBuFi2

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) January 5, 2017

Oh, I Get It Now

From Crooks & Liars - Blue Gal (Frances Langum)

That's an awful big buncha smoke for no fire.

More Lying Numbers

• Clinton got 2.8 Million votes more than Trump, but Trump's the new Prez.
• In races for the House, Repubs got 49% of the votes and 55% of the seats.
• In the Senate, the GOP owns a "majority" even though the Dems got 23 Million more votes.

Somethin' ain't right.

The GOP Plan

Coming soon to an America near you.

The two party system in America... pic.twitter.com/QkGtbTUrOH

— Timothy Tingley (@timothy_tingley) January 5, 2017

Cuz I can. Cuz you can't stop me. Cuz if you stop me, I'll find another way to fuck you over. 

Cuz that's how we do things now.

I get to do whatever you can't force me to stop doing.

Cuz fuck you, that's why.

FYI

Mitch McConnell says "the American people won't tolerate obstruction...".  

Now, I'm not completely stoopid (kinda, sometimes, but not completely), and while my memory isn't all that photographic, I'm not a fucking goldfish either, so my first reaction is "The fuck I won't".

But it's good to remember also that when a Repub says "the American people", he's referring to the 23% of the GOP crazies that make up the Radical Right - people he can count on to show up whenever he whistles.

So we gotta push back - loudly and publicly - it's important to let our "leaders" know what we think, and one quick and easy delivery system for that feedback is to tweet at them.  So here's an infographic listing all the Twitter handles of the US Senators sitting on the Judiciary Committee.

Hammer 'em.

Keith

Watch this video on The Scene.

Today's Podcast

The Boss talks a bit about Trump (starting about 58:00 in):

It's A Wonderment

It seems like the GOP has grown more and more sour on the CIA ever since they helped the black guy kill Osama bin Laden.

hat tip = @TeaPainUSA

Those Lying Numbers

People voted for either Dems or Other over the Repubs by a margin of nearly 2 million, but somehow the GOP maintained their hold on the majority.

Vote Caging-by-Gerrymandering, plus outright Suppression.

How long do we put up with this shit?

We'll See

Time Magazine Online:

According to a Gallup poll released Monday, Americans have significantly less faith in Trump than they had in his predecessors. Only 44% said they are confident Trump will avoid major scandals in his Administration, 46% said they are confident in Trump’s ability to handle an international crisis, and 47% said they trust him to use military force wisely. When the same questions were asked at the start of Barack Obama’s, George W. Bush’s and Bill Clinton’s terms, roughly three-quarters of Americans said they had confidence in the newly elected President in these areas.

When compared with Gallup’s averages of confidence polling in his predecessors, Trump comes up short: he has a 32-point confidence deficit in his ability to avoid scandals in his Administration, a 29-point deficit in his ability to use military force well and a 28-point deficit in his ability to manage the Executive Branch. Most Americans (60%) believe Trump will be able to get things done with Congress, but even there he comes up far behind his predecessors — the average number of Americans with confidence in Obama, Bush and Clinton to work with Congress was 82%.

The main thing (for me), is that Trump has benefited greatly from Low Expectations. And that's become kind of a standard play with the GOP in the last 25 years or so - The Empty Vessel; the guy with no experience and no practical know-how or training; coming in to do a job that he's woefully unprepared to do.  

We've become so dis-enamored with politicians that we've gone completely the opposite direction, arriving at a point where we've adopted a straight-up contradiction as our guiding principle:

Anybody with the right qualifications for the job is obviously unqualified.

That weird sound you hear is Ayn Rand doing a series of over-exaggerated zombie face palms.

Today's Tweet

grifters gonna grift.

remember when DC press had collective 6-yr heart attack re: Dems and Lincoln Bedroom? https://t.co/rjxX1X1JMr

— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) January 2, 2017

It's a short piece with not much new, but that's the point: the corruption doesn't become thoroughly normalized and embedded until we get bored with hearing about it, so the one thing we can't allow ourselves is to get used to it - to accept official corruption as an everyday thing.

A person who travels in Palm Beach society circles said that tickets to the party were being sold for $525 each for members and $575 each for guests.
Trump’s transition team declined to comment on the ticket prices.

Incoming White House Director of Strategic Communications Hope Hicks rejected criticisms that Mar-a-Lago was selling access to the president-elect.

“The transition is not concerned about the appearance of a conflict,” she said.

“This is an annual celebratory event at the private club, like others that have continued to occur since the election. Additionally, the president cannot and does not have a conflict.”

Yes - I know - it's a corrupt system that was pretty fucked up way before this most recent election.

And yes - I know - that's the general theme of the 2016 election, because it seems enough of us got fooled into thinking Donald Trump is somehow the GOP version of FDR, and they actually voted in favor of Kleptocratic Kakistocracy, and now a guy who's possibly the most corrupt asshole in the history of corrupt assholes will be sworn in as POTUS on the 20th of this month.

And yes - of course - let's be sure to throw in some bullshit about "Both Sides"...

• and "The Evil Duopoly"
• and what a lousy candidate Hillary was
• and how stoopidly inept the DNC is (even tho' it's also all-powerful and able to dictate the results for any given candidacy)
• and how the Dems just can't figure out how to blah blah fucking blah (see fucked up corrupt system above)
• and, "we was robbed!"
• and don't forget, "Bernie! If only Bernie!".

We all have our pet reasons for voting for a certain candidate, and we all have our pet reasons for voting against the others, and we all have our pet reasons for what went wrong when it it doesn't turn out the way we want.

Remember though that it comes down to having to put together a coalition of 60-70 million voters. When it works, you have a shitload of reasons it worked. And when it doesn't work, you have a shitload of reasons it didn't work.

So nurse your grudges and pick at each other all ya want, but don't bring that shit to me. We have to stop preaching at each other about it now and get back to work. We have dragons to slay and villages to rescue.

Meet The New Boss

Today's Quote

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor, and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.

--Oscar Ameringer

hat tip = FB friend Doug R

Today's Pix

Today's Tweet

The definition of irony, FOX News reporting on fake news! pic.twitter.com/xEbwfJNJZq

— philip harris (@pharris830) January 1, 2017

When the main subject of "the news" is "the news", we've gone beyond the reach of even the most sophisticated and sardonic irony.

This has to be a strong indication that we've been running in tighter and tighter circles for so long that we are now ready to complete the process of political evolution by disappearing up our own assholes (Allan Sherman --The Rape Of The A*P*E).

Pick A Side

In today's little fit of nostalgia, I'll say that we used to have movies for grownups where the lines were drawn pretty clearly. I'm not saying there's always a perfect dichotomy, but most of the time, there's a fairly obvious distinction between what's right and what's not, and art should illustrate those values for us - or at least reflect the values we manifest in living our everyday lives.

At some point you have to be able to step back and take a look at your own position. An art-form is supposed to help us with this self-examination thing, but it seems like something's shifted, and we've been pushed off kilter.

When I look back on some of the great movies that helped us figure ourselves out, and I start to wonder about overlaying those lessons onto our ideological alignments today, I can't help but think an awful lotta people would find themselves on the wrong side.

12 Angry Men

Seven Days In May

It's A Wonderful Life

Executive Suite

I promise this is not just me wanting to go back to some simpler time - there's no such thing in the first place. 

But what I'm always going to be harping on is that we have to be committed to believing as many true things as possible and not believing as many false things as possible. And we have to keep learning and relearning the skills we need to know the difference.

Raising My Hand

An asshole like Trump will always call you an asshole because he's trying desperately to hide the fact that he's the asshole, while knowing with some certainty that you're not.

And now he calls us "enemy".

The Passing

Today's Podcast

The Adventures Of The Cornfield Resistance

⇩ click here ⇩

☞ The Professional Left ☜

Glad That One's Over

Like a man who's had a thoroughly unsatisfying breakfast, and sees no great prospects for lunch.

John Oliver:

However, Vox begs to differ:

To get help making sense of all these upheavals and tragedies, I reached out to Harvard psychology professor and polymath Steven Pinker. A cognitive scientist and linguist, Pinker focused his study of human nature on our propensity for violence — and conversely, cooperation — in his 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. In the book, Pinker meticulously documented a steady decline in violence over the past several centuries, which, he writes, "may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species."

In August, he told me the world is still in a more peaceful period than at any other time in history. (You can read the whole conversation here.) A few days ago, I reached out to him again. I wanted to see how Pinker was looking back over the year that was 2016 — if the election of Trump, and all the global violence that followed, had changed anything. The email conversation that follows has been edited for length and clarity.

But then again, these things run in cycles - and we're only just now entering the Trump Era - so there's always a fair chance for the whole thing to go straight into the shitter after all.

Today's Joke

A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She lowered her altitude and spotted a man in a boat on a lake below. She shouted to him:

"Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, "You're in a hot air balloon, approximately 30 feet above ground elevation of 2,346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.

She rolled her eyes and said, "You must be an Obama Democrat.

"I am," replied the man. "How did you know?"

"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is technically correct. But I have no idea what to do with your information, and I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help to me."

The man smiled and responded, "And you must be a Republican."

"I am," replied the balloonist. "How did you know?"

"Well, madam" said the man, "You don't know where you are; you don't know how you got here, and you don't know where you are going. You've risen to where you are, due to practically nothing but hot air. You made a promise you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem for you. You're in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but somehow, now it's my fault."

hat tip = FB friend Bill D, via quora.com

It Is To Laugh

Turnabout's Fair Play

When a Trump fans tells you to "respect" your president... SHO...
Let's re. how they treated Pres. Obama, shall we? pic.twitter.com/HALa9AbhkO

— vlh (@coton_luver) December 30, 2016

It seems at first blush I'd be exposing myself to the Hypocrite charge, but that presupposes Obama and Trump are the same and that fits perfectly into the False Equivalence fallacy.

Point being that Obama didn't have any of it comin' because it was all just a buncha made-up bullshit, while it looks like practically everything Trump's taking flak for is either true or has a pretty high probability of being true.

The GOP lost their minds and set the rules that are getting them bitch-slapped right now, so they don't get to whine about how unfair they think it is.

Karma's a motherfucker.

More Bad News

Comet 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdušáková will NOT destroy the earth this time around, so our long global nightmare will continue for (probably) another 5.25 years - until it comes back around.

Of course, with "President" Chaos in the White House, the odds improve greatly for the end to come a little sooner.

Sleep well.

Commerce Marches On

From WaPo today:

A new law in Michigan will prohibit local governments from banning, regulating or imposing fees on the use of plastic bags and other containers. You read that correctly: It’s not a ban on plastic bags — it’s a ban on banning plastic bags.

--and--

Bans and restrictions on the use of plastic bags are widespread in other parts of the country and around the world. The rationale is simple: Plastic bags are infamous non-biodegradable sources of pollution — although they will eventually break down into tiny pieces, scientists believe this process can take hundreds of years, or even up to a century, in landfills.

--and--

The new Michigan law was met with praise from the Michigan Restaurant Association for this reason.

“With many of our members owning and operating locations across the state, preventing a patchwork approach of additional regulations is imperative to avoid added complexities as it related to day-to-day business operations,” said Robert O’Meara, the association’s vice president of government affairs, in a statement.

Threaten the Cookie Cutter Cost-vs-Profit Structure, and the Rent Collectors will punish you.

And what was that about a powerful remote Central Government imposing its will on the noble local folk?

2016 In Review

So, looking back -
Death
Death
Death
Death
Brexit
Death
Death
Death
Death
Trump
Death
Death
Death
Christm...nope, wait - Death

Serious, fuck off already

hat tip = @Bristol52

Today's Quote

Arendt also coined "the banality of evil" - referring to how great atrocities can be traced back to the small seemingly unimportant steps taken by ordinary people who believed that were doing nothing wrong. Kinda like when the Trump transition team (eg) asks for the names of people at the Dept of Energy who attended Climate Change seminars.

We have to maintain an awareness of the Logical Fallacy of The Slippery Slope, but we must also remember that slopes do exist; and they can get pretty fucking slippery in a big fucking hurry.

Let's try to watch what we're doin'.

Once More From The Top

Test for truth:

The presence of Confirming Evidence

--and--

The absence of Conflicting Evidence

Test for bullshit:

The absence of Confirming Evidence

--or--

The presence of Conflicting Evidence

Today's Meme

Be the reason someone smiles today

Or the reason they drink

Whatever works the best for the most

Today's Quote

Not being loved is a simple misfortune. The true fatality is to not know how to love.

--Albert Camus (from a Spanish translation)