Today's Buzz

Buzz Burbank News and Comment:

The Shearer Dossier:

Unlike Steele, Shearer does not have a background in espionage, and his memo was initially viewed with scepticism, not least because he had shared it with select media organisations before the election.

However, the Guardian has been told the FBI investigation is still assessing details in the “Shearer memo” and is pursuing intriguing leads.

One source with knowledge of the inquiry said the fact the FBI was still working on it suggested investigators had taken an aspect of it seriously.


TrumpIsNotAboveTheLaw.org

Enter your zip code and get ready to hit the streets.

Pay close attention at about 44:10 - when Buzz Points out that we're still pretty much the Stoopid Country.

Today's Today

I've always had a hard time remembering what the whole groundhog thing meant.

Here's a handy updated guide:

That Right There

I've not seen a better example of someone being hermetically sealed in a bubble of deliberate ignorance.

It's the Post-Truth-Only-My-Opinion-Matters-Please-Jesus-Bring-The-Apocalypse-So-I-Don't-Hafta-Admit-To-Myself-I'm-Full-Of-Shit Blues

Fish gotta swim
Birds gotta fly
Rubes gotta rube
And we all know why

About Last Night

I didn't watch the SOTU - for the first time in a very long time. 

I decided instead to binge "Dirty Money" on Netflix (which was even more depressing), and then I switched to picking fly shit out of my pepper shaker because that at least retains a tiny bit of entertainment value.

First blush - WaPo:

Have a president’s words ever rung more hollow? In his first State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Trump spoke of “what kind of nation we are going to be. All of us, together, as one team, one people and one American family.” Yet Mr. Trump could not avoid, even for an hour, lacing his address with divisive references to hot-button issues and graceless attacks on his predecessors: to “disastrous Obamacare,” “the mistakes of past administrations,” “the era of economic surrender” and more.

You caught that, right? Translation: "You look like me and you think like me and you act like me, or you get the fuck out."

Cult45 devotees believe America is some kind of social club, and the first order of business is to keep people out of it.

More to the point, he offered little reason to hope that his second-year policies would be more constructive than those of his first. The president spent the past year attacking America’s democratic institutions and splitting the “American family.” His concern for building “one team” has not stopped him from ramping up deportations of harmless people or imperiling the future of the “dreamers,” all of whom have played their part on the American team. His desire for bipartisanship has not led him to negotiate with Democrats in good-faith on health care, taxes or immigration. His search for unity did not stop him Tuesday from taking a gratuitous dig at football players who kneel during the national anthem. As he took a victory lap on the economy, Mr. Trump displayed his typical indifference to the truth, claiming he “enacted the biggest tax cuts and reforms in American history.” They are not.

So, typical of the Daddy State, the "speech" was a fair demonstration that it takes about 90 minutes for a below-average rooster to claim credit for the sunrise, and to intimidate the other chickens by flapping his wings a lot and strutting around desperately pretending not to know that most of us can see him for the phony tin-plated martinet that he so obviously is.

- and this doozy from Ed Rogers:

Oh, and by the way, you probably haven’t heard much of this from the liberal mainstream media, but Democrats could not appear more fractured in the aftermath of Trump’s State of the Union address. Democrats scheduled six separate responses to the president’s address...

No, Ed - there were six responses (and more than that number were justified, I think) because that's just how bad your "president" has stunk up the joint.

For all you "Yeah-but-the-Dems-don't-have-a-message" dolts in the immediate vicinity:  Oh for fuck's sake.

First, stop thinking you can talk some sense into the rubes - you're not The Idiot Meat-Bag Whisperer.

Second, "What Message?" Pick a fucking message; any fucking message. We heard exactly the same 10 or 12 policy messages  from the SOTU Responders last night that Hillary and Bernie and many others spent all of 2016 trying to get across to us.

Economic equity
Infrastructure
Training and/or schooling
Equal rights
Rule of law
Environment
and
and
and

But no - Fart Breathers like Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon saw large numbers of rubes who were making the deliberate choice to be deaf and blind, and they decided the only possible conclusion was that Hillary had gone mute.

Of course, you can only make that stick if you assume 2016 happened under "normal" circumstances - which brings us back around to the simple fact that way too many of us are trying to pretend "The Presumption Of Regularity" is still valid and in place. It isn't.

BTW: Hey, Press Poodles - we know y'all went to school and learnt your-bad-selfs a right big bunch about how this politics bidness is supposed to work; and we know you're just dyin' to show that off a little. We get it.

But here's the thing: All of that's about halfway down inside the dung heap now.  So stop looking for every goddamned opportunity to show us what you think you know about how things oughta be, and start reporting on the way things are.

We're all being buried in this shit pile together, so you can be all college-y and impressive later - for right now, we need you on a shovel.

Today's Quote

"I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is, for the most part, inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past, people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that 'facts' existed and were more or less discoverable.

And in practice, there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other.

It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that Totalitarianism destroys."

--George Orwell, On The Spanish Civil War

Today's Tweet

Here's a quick look at some of that "weak messaging" by the Dems.

I can ask you to listen. I can insist on it. But I can't hear it for you.

Pretty obnoxious the GOP thinks workers should be weak-kneed with gratitude for corporations giving them pennies while pocketing a multi-billion dollar tax break stolen from the future of the middle class. #GOPTaxScam pic.twitter.com/ulLIexUf4q

— Nancy Pelosi (@NancyPelosi) January 26, 2018

 

Today's Tweet

Hillary Clinton has her faults.

And she's no hero - unless by "hero", you mean somebody who's been doing the job for 40 years in spite of constantly coming under withering fire - often from her own side - and in the most horrific circumstances any of us will ever experience outside of our worst nightmares.

Like this:

To discuss how Hillary Clinton HAS TO GO AWAY we turn to our panel of John Kerry, Jimmy Carter, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and via satellite, Al Gore. Also weighing in will be Howard Dean, Bernie Sanders, and Jeb Bush.

— Oliver Willis (@owillis) January 29, 2018

 

On Trying To Listen Better

Lili Loofbourow, The Week:

"Grace," the 23-year-old woman, was not an employee of Ansari's, meaning there were no workplace dynamics. Her repeated objections and pleas that they "slow down" were all well and good, but they did not square with the fact that she eventually gave Ansari oral sex. Finally, crucially, she was free to leave.

Why didn't she just get out of there as soon as she felt uncomfortable? many people explicitly or implicitly asked.

It's a rich question, and there are plenty of possible answers. But if you're asking in good faith, if you really want to think through why someone might have acted as she did, the most important one is this: Women are enculturated to be uncomfortable most of the time. And to ignore their discomfort.
- and -

The Aziz Ansari case hit a nerve because, as I've long feared, we're only comfortable with movements like #MeToo so long as the men in question are absolute monsters we can easily separate from the pack. Once we move past the "few bad apples" argument and start to suspect that this is more a trend than a blip, our instinct is to normalize. To insist that this is just how men are, and how sex is.
- and then -

This is what Andrew Sullivan basically proposed in his latest, startlingly unscientific column. #MeToo has gone too far, he argues, by refusing to confront the biological realities of maleness. Feminism, he says, has refused to give men their due and denied the role "nature" must play in these discussions. Ladies, he writes, if you keep denying biology, you'll watch men get defensive, react, and "fight back."

This is beyond vapid. Not only is Sullivan bafflingly confused about nature and its realities, as Colin Dickey notes in this instructive Twitter thread, he's being appallingly conventional. Sullivan claims he came to "understand the sheer and immense natural difference between being a man and being a woman" thanks to a testosterone injection he received. That is to say, he imagines maleness can be isolated to an injectable hormone and doesn't bother to imagine femaleness at all. If you want an encapsulation of the habits of mind that made #MeToo necessary, there it is. Sullivan, that would-be contrarian, is utterly representative.
Andrew Sullivan? Really?  I suspect he knows a thing or two about himself as a man, but his opinion on how men and women act and react in physically intimate encounters is not to be taken too seriously.  I could dismiss it just on the dubious merits of Man-Splaining, but throw in Gay-Splaining and you've kinda lost me altogether.

Maybe that's partly why Ms Loofbourow includes his perspective - to illustrate the problem of disconnection(?) - but I'm not sure it doesn't just cloud the really solid points she's making.

It could also be that I've chosen that particular nit to pick; and that could be not much more than my imagining the world to be a better place without Mr Sullivan in it.

Anyway, getting at the gist of it:

..."Everyone who regularly encounters the complaint of dyspareunia knows that women are inclined to continue with coitus, if necessary, with their teeth tightly clenched."

If you asked yourself why "Grace" didn't leave Ansari's apartment as soon as she felt "uncomfortable," you should be asking the same question here. If sex hurt, why didn't she stop? Why is this happening? Why are women enduring excruciating pain to make sure men have orgasms?

The answer isn't separable from our current discussion about how women have been routinely harassed, abused, and dismissed because men wanted to have erections in the workplace. It boggles the mind that Sullivan thinks we don't sufficiently consider men's biological reality when our entire society has agreed to organize itself around the pursuit of the straight male orgasm. This quest has been granted total cultural centrality — with unfortunate consequences for our understanding of bodies, and pleasure, and pain.
If you asked yourself why "Grace" didn't leave Ansari's apartment as soon as she felt "uncomfortable," you should be asking the same question here. If sex hurt, why didn't she stop? Why is this happening? Why are women enduring excruciating pain to make sure men have orgasms?

The answer isn't separable from our current discussion about how women have been routinely harassed, abused, and dismissed because men wanted to have erections in the workplace. It boggles the mind that Sullivan thinks we don't sufficiently consider men's biological reality when our entire society has agreed to organize itself around the pursuit of the straight male orgasm. This quest has been granted total cultural centrality — with unfortunate consequences for our understanding of bodies, and pleasure, and pain.

- and -

I wish we lived in a world that encouraged women to attend to their bodies' pain signals instead of powering through like endurance champs. It would be grand if women (and men) were taught to consider a woman's pain abnormal; better still if we understood a woman's discomfort to be reason enough to cut a man's pleasure short.

But those aren't actually the lessons society teaches — no, not even to "entitled" millennials. Remember: Sex is always a step behind social progress in other areas because of its intimacy. Talking details is hard, and it's good we're finally starting to. But next time we're inclined to wonder why a woman didn't immediately register and fix her own discomfort, we might wonder why we spent the preceding decades instructing her to override the signals we now blame her for not recognizing.

Note to self: Be aware. See her for who she is. Appreciate it, and tell her about it.

Today's Pix

Today's Tweet

What "conservatives" fear most is a living thinking brain, complete with a properly functioning memory.

Every time Trump tweets " AMERICA FIRST" just remember where he got that slogan from. pic.twitter.com/Wu09pZjWpW

— Dominique Hamilton (@Underrated_Dom) January 28, 2018

Today's GIF

Nothing is as it seems - welcome to the Post-Truth Unfettered Market World of the modern GOP.

Today's Tweet

Steve Wynn's turn - and his stock price took a beating too. 

To everyone who posted the picture of Hillary Clinton and Weinstein, please post this too. I'll wait. #SteveWynn #TimesUp pic.twitter.com/N72sWW7glf

— Carol Ann Leif (@carolannleif) January 26, 2018

 

ProLeft Podcast

The Professional Left Podcast

It's not a football game. We can take no pleasure in bringing down a president, because what we're doing is some pretty serious business.

But holy fuck, it's going to be cause for a feeling of great satisfaction when 45* - and hopefully, the bulk of the Radical GOP - are stomped back into the dung heap "conservatives" have been sprouting from for a solid 30 years.  

And I fully intend to celebrate to a near-blackout kind of excess.

Not because "Blue Team Wins", but because we're done with the first thing on a very long list.

Like the man said: It's not the beginning of the end - we still have a very long way to go - but maybe we can think of it as the end of the beginning.

Get your swag on too

The Buzz Man

You've heard it before, and here it is again:

Of all the wealth generated in the world last year, 82% of it went to the Top 1%.
None of it - NONE OF IT - went to the bottom 50%.

And there's a very good rundown of what's been happening in the Mueller investigation, and the bit about the use of bots and American social media.*

Buzz Burbank - News & Comment:




*BTW -

Why Fake News Targeted Trump Supporters - The Atlantic from last year.

‘Fake News’: Wide Reach but Little Impact, Study Suggests - NYT this month 

(I think this guy's conclusions are a bit silly, because we know that moving even a low percentage of voters makes a huge difference)
Here's the study

Abstract: 

Though some warnings about online “echo chambers” have been hyperbolic, tenden- cies toward selective exposure to politically congenial content are likely to extend to misinformation and to be exacerbated by social media platforms. We test this prediction using data on the factually dubious articles known as “fake news.” Using unique data combining survey responses with individual-level web tra c histories, we estimate that approximately 1 in 4 Americans visited a fake news website from October 7-November 14, 2016. Trump supporters visited the most fake news web- sites, which were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. However, fake news consumption was heavily concentrated among a small group — almost 6 in 10 visits to fake news web- sites came from the 10% of people with the most conservative online information diets. We also find that Facebook was a key vector of exposure to fake news and that fact-checks of fake news almost never reached its consumers.
Happy Friday!

Today's GIF

Try to stay in touch with it.