nikhil.io

This story [Conservative backlash at Vance hoping his wife wouldn’t go to Hell] is not bad in isolation, but it is so when contextualized by Vance’s story.

JD Vance is an empty opportunistic suit who changed skins many times to fit the game: he is doing it here as well:

The Atlantic wrote a detailed profile titled “The Talented Mr. Vance”, mirroring the movie “The Talented Mr. Ripley” about a character who steals identities. Let me add my perspective and lay out the many “Vances” we had:

• A neo-con when he was in Iraq and afterwards: he was the only one in his base excited that the mystery visitor was Dick Cheney and not Jessica Simpson.
• He shifted ideology to gain wealth and elite access: becoming a globalist Silicon-Valley-type enlightened-secular-agnostic marrying an Indian and giving his kids Indian names, calling Trump a Nazi.
• He shifted ideology to faux populist MAGA but quietly retained Silicon Valley connections to enrich himself and advance their agenda.
• As the Right went further Right: JD Vance becomes Catholic in 2019.
• When 2024 came along: he became more Trumpian and bashing, discarding political decorum. He then used his Silicon Valley connections to become VP hence the current Big Tech dominance over the administration.
• Now, JD Vance is transforming again; adopting Groyper-ish attitudes and dismissiveness to align with the online far right. He stopped making any posts celebrating Hindu holidays or showing his kids, wife and extended Indian family. He knows the online Right is intolerant of his wife’s and kids’ Hinduism and Hindu names, hence he said what he said "I’ll convert them for you"

Someone should probably tell the rich that workers banding together to present formal address of grievances is the alternative we worked out a long time ago to breaking down the factory owner’s front door and beating him to death in front of his family? I feel like they forgot.

Spoilers!

The protagonist is in Hell and takes us there with him: You have no idea what’s going

Behold a 40-year old calcified fetus baby in an 82-year old woman.

This is His Plan, His (Intelligent) Design, and it is Perfect. As a single-issue voter, it is worth casting your lot with rapists and pedophiles and crooks over the unnaturalness of reproductive rights under all circumstances.

And pretty sure this woman would get a US citizenship and the Medal of Freedom if she weren’t a POC from a “shithole” country.

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An elderly Colombian woman was stunned when she went to the doctor for pelvic pain and was told the pain was caused by a 40-year-old “stone” fetus.

The 82-year-old had been carrying the calcified four-pound fetus called a lithopedion for decades without realizing it, according to the Telegraph.

Doctors only discovered the rare medical phenomenon after ordering an X-ray that revealed the lithopedion, also called a “stone baby.” The woman is now expected to undergo surgery to remove it.

Dr. Kim Garcsi, who directs the ob/gyn clerkship program at University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland, said the condition is so rare it has only been recorded approximately 300 times in medical literature.

Garcsi, who did not treat the Colombian woman, says the lithopedion is created when a pregnancy forms in the abdomen rather than in the uterus. When the pregnancy ultimately fails, usually because the fetus does not have enough blood supply, there is no way for the body to expel the fetus.

As a result, the body turns the fetus to “stone,” using the same immune process that protects the body from any foreign object detected in a person’s system. Garcsi said it may seem odd, but that the process is used constantly in the body to stay healthy.

“When you get old cartilage in the knee, it calcifies,” Garcsi explains. The calcification of the tissue protects the mother from infection, but also means the “stone” baby can remain in the abdomen undetected for decades.

“Most of the time people find these and sometimes even after they’re found and don’t do anything about it because they’re totally asymptomatic,” said Garcsi.

The rate of an abdominal pregnancy is about 1 in 10,000 pregnancies; however, Garcsi said modern medical care usually identifies any issues that would lead to a lithopedion before the “stone” baby can form.

No notes.

Part I #

Part II #

“LimeWire acquires Fyre Festival, has vague plans to offer ‘real experiences’” and I am beside myself.

A company founded by a now finance-bro anti-vaxxer (so we’re already off to a fantastic start) that nuked people’s computers in the 2000s, cockroached it out for twenty-five years, and now nukes people’s wallets by being an “NFT music marketplace”, bought a festival started by a guy¹ who pled guilty to “one count of wire fraud to defraud investors and ticket holders” and who, after serving his sentence, decided to give it another go.

It sounds like LimeWire might want to turn Fyre Festival into a physical perk of the digital collectibles it sells through its NFT marketplace.

I’ve enjoyed the Fyre documentary at least twice, thought it deserved a sequel, and was dismayed to find out that the Fyre 2 festival got canceled.

I cannot describe how excited I am.

“Fyre became a symbol of hype gone wrong, but it also made history,” LimeWire CEO Julian Zehetmayr shared in a press release. “We’re not bringing the festival back — we’re bringing the brand and the meme back to life. This time with real experiences, and without the cheese sandwiches.”

Godspeed bro. I am very glad he addressed the sandwich. It has never failed to make me laugh and I wish I owned the NFT. Thanks to this deal, I might soon 🥰

Here’s some more context. This awful stuff was “really just supposed to be for staff”. You know, subhumans.

(Cached)

Much of the modern decline of the United States can be traced back to Ronald Reagan. He ran on a Christian nationalist platform and can be generally credited with the permeation of right-wing Christianity in contemporary American politics. That base felt emboldened with Reagan’s victory and pursued increasingly more reactionary and nationalistic policies. There is no MAGA movement without Reagan setting the groundwork.

Reagan was just as bad on the policy side. His response to the AIDS crisis cost hundreds of thousands, and potentially millions, of lives. He was behind Iran Contra, which had destabilizing effects in Latin America and the Middle East which persist to this day. He dismantled FDR’s social safety nets with racist fearmongering that insisted that poor block woman were taking advantage of social programs. He began a long history of tax cuts that redistributed obscene amounts of wealth to the richest in the US. He propped up the Muhajideen and destabilized Afghanistan, among countless other terrorist groups. He began the war on drugs and irreparably damaged many of America’s most historic cities.

Reagan was a racist, a nationalist, a religious zealot, and above all, a senile fool who was used by moneyed interests to begin a decades-long campaign of deliberate policy to strengthen the rule of the 1%. Without Reagan, there is no Trump.

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Don’t forget removing the Fairness Doctrine which allowed for opinion based news instead of fact based reporting to emerge. Which brought about CNN and other 24h news channels, which brought about FOX news, which allowed loud right wing voices to spread (Rush Limbaugh), which slowly divided the country until we arrive to now and watching the US government become a fascist dictatorship supported by right wing billionaires who control most of the media we consume.

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Also don’t forget that he eliminated low-cost subsidized public universities and began the concept of student loans.

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Also, don’t forget all of the federal funding he took away from institutions to help the mentally ill and impaired, which has led to very crazy people living on the streets ever since.

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Also dont forget that he completely crushed the labor movement by sidestepping any attempt at good faith labor negotiations and firing workers en masse-violating the agreed upon contracts the fed government signed off on.

This is some seriously astounding cinematography. It’s an average story with an immersive, inky, post-war atmosphere. No deep motifs or themes here. I learned that the main actress was considered the most beautiful woman in the world by Mussolini which is… something I know now.

Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton are splendid in their roles but I was extremely pleased to see Wilfrid Hyde-White. I last saw him in an episode of Columbo (he’s been in two of them) and it’s just a delight to see him be at least 400% upper-class British 🇬🇧

The Fucking Zither #

The movie’s set in post-war Vienna. Its director, a guy called Carol Reed, didn’t want to do the ordinary thing of using “schmaltzy, heavily orchestrated waltzes”. So he goes to a party and, to our great misfortune, is gobsmacked by this musician playing a zither¹. He makes an immediate decision to employ this chap posthaste, paying no consideration to the at least ten other funky instruments and styles of music he could have explored in the very cultural city (maybe even that night!)

All this to say: that music is the most annoying fucking background score I’ve heard in a movie. And that’s saying a lot given my not-so-secret appetite for B-grade Indian cinema.

The American film critic Roger Ebert later asked: “Has there ever been a film where the music more perfectly suited the action than in Carol Reed’s The Third Man?”

Well Mister Ebert (RIP), there are several, and this movie shouldn’t even merit any consideration. The music is silly and comically at odds with the vibe of the story and visuals. Each

Each exasperation would remind me of those

Between my exasperations whenever I’d hear the bloody thing, I couldn’t help but think of ‘serious’ situations that feature a recorder. Like this:

Or this:

Here’s an entire playlist.

It’s still awesome #

The bonedrilly music aside, this is a solid movie and supremely easy to get lost in. Perfect to watch on a lazy and rainy Saturday night, right before bed.

Some Conservative and American sentiments we can all get behind.

She’s “voluptuous”

She’s a “piece of ass”.

“Perhaps I’d be dating her”.

She has “the best body - and I created her.”

“If I weren’t happily married…”

“Is it wrong to be more sexually attracted to your own daughter than your wife?” Ivanka was 13 at the time.

“She’s hot”.

They have “sex [in common]".

Encouraged her to release a sex tape.

Expressing shock that a gay Apprentice contestant wasn’t attracted to her.

Also of note: A teen pageant contestant complained to Ivanka in 1997 about Trump barging into the dressing rooms while the competitors were changing clothes. Ivanka’s response: “Yeah, he does that.”

And listen to the 2016 testimony of Jane Doe, who claims Trump raped her when she was 13 at one of Jeffrey Epstein’s parties. Doe says that Trump communicated to the recruiter that he was interested in her because she was wearing a blonde wig and reminded him of his daughter.

Tells Stormy Daniels “You remind me of my daughter”.

“Aides said he talked about Ivanka Trump’s breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her, remarks that once led John Kelly to remind the president that Ivanka was his daughter,” Taylor writes. “Afterward, Kelly retold that story to me in visible disgust. Trump, he said, was ‘a very, very evil man.’”

I am more than 50% sure that Kelly voted for him in 2024.

The Complete Trump-Epstein Timeline: Decades of Connections, Cover-ups, and Contradictions #

TL;DR: Trump had a 15+ year friendship with Epstein, his DOJ was riddled with conflicts of interest, and when Epstein died in Trump’s custody, he immediately blamed the Clintons while covering up his own deeper connections.

Part 1: The 15-Year Friendship (1987-2002) #

1987: Trump and Epstein first meet. Became “nightlife musketeers” with Tom Barrack (Mercury News)

1992: NBC footage captures them partying at Mar-a-Lago with 28 cheerleaders. Trump whispers in Epstein’s ear, points at women saying “She’s hot”

1993-1997: Flight logs show Trump flew on Epstein’s plane at least 7 times, including with Tiffany and Marla Maples

2002: Trump’s infamous quote to New York Magazine (Washington Post):

“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Part 2: The Falling Out (2004-2008) #

2004: Trump outbids Epstein for Palm Beach mansion. Two weeks later, police get first tip about Epstein (Washington Post)

Key fact: 16-year-old Virginia Giuffre was recruited at Mar-a-Lago while working as spa attendant. Her father was maintenance manager at Trump’s club.

Part 3: Trump Administration Conflicts of Interest (2017-2021) #

2017: Trump appoints Alexander Acosta as Labor Secretary - the same prosecutor who gave Epstein the sweetheart 2008 plea deal (CNBC)

2019: William Barr becomes AG despite massive conflicts:

• Barr’s father hired Epstein to teach at elite school despite zero credentials
• Barr worked at Kirkland & Ellis, the firm that represented Epstein

The Recusal Flip-Flop:

• July 8: Barr recuses himself
• July 9: Reverses recusal after “consulting ethics officials”

Part 4: Epstein’s Death & Trump’s Hypocrisy (August 10, 2019) #

6:30 AM: Epstein found dead in Trump’s DOJ custody
That evening: Trump promotes Clinton conspiracy theories

Official tweet timestamps from American Presidency Project:

• 22:01:25: Retweets about Clinton’s flights
• 22:01:56: Just 31 seconds later, retweets: “Died of SUICIDE on 24/7 SUICIDE WATCH? Yeah right! #JefferyEpstein had information on Bill Clinton”

The conspiracy retweet got 70,642 retweets - massive amplification.

The Hypocrisy: While blaming Clinton, Trump ignored his own:

• 15-year friendship with Epstein
• 7 documented flights on Epstein’s plane
• 14 phone numbers in Epstein’s book
• The 2002 “younger women” quote

Part 5: The 2025 Cover-up #

June 2024: Trump tells Fox News he’d declassify Epstein files, but Fox edited out his backtrack: “I guess I would… you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there”

February 2025: AG Pam Bondi claims Epstein “client list” is “sitting on my desk”

July 7, 2025: DOJ releases memo declaring:

• Epstein died by suicide (case closed)
• No “client list” exists
• No further prosecutions

July 8, 2025: When asked about Epstein, Trump snaps: “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years… This creep”

The Evolution of Trump’s Denials: #

• 2002: “Terrific guy… likes beautiful women… on the younger side”
• 2019: “I was not a fan… haven’t spoken in 15 years”
• 2025: “This creep… waste of time to discuss”

The MAGA Rebellion #

Trump’s own supporters are furious about the cover-up. Alex Jones, Laura Loomer, and Tucker Carlson are turning on the administration for burying the case.

The Bottom Line #

Trump had deeper documented connections to Epstein than Clinton ever did, yet spent years promoting conspiracy theories while his own administration covered up the case. The same DOJ that was supposed to investigate Epstein’s death was run by people with direct conflicts of interest.

This represents one of the most hypocritical and suspicious handling of a major criminal case in presidential history.

Loved it. The star of the movie was Krypto.

WokeMan #

• Bar
• Home
• Office
• Airport
• Temple
• Church
• Mosque
• Concert
• Hospital
• Nightclub
• Newsroom
• Restaurant
• Pre-school Synagogue
• Yoga studio
• High school
• Military base
• Bowling alley
• Street corner
• Movie theater
• Political event
• Middle school
• College campus
• Elementary school
• Super Bowl victory rally

Was listening to this episode of the excellent Hysteria podcast about this guy called “The Liver King”¹. He claimed to have gotten shredded by consuming raw organs, called himself the “CEO of the Ancestral Lifestyle” and had about 5 million YouTube followers.

Liver King attributed his hypermasculine physique and energy to nine “ancestral tenets” including a diet loaded with raw organ meat (which he conveniently sold in capsule form) before a leaked email revealed he was also supplementing with more than $11,000 of performance-enhancing drugs each month.

Anyway. I never thought of manosphere masculinity

By making sure they have at least one meal a day?
“No.”

By giving them vaccines?
“No.”

By making sure guns don’t end up in schools?
“No.”

By making sure their family can afford a house, car, etc.?
“No.”

By making sure they can afford a future house, car, college education, etc.?
“No.”

By making sure they have easy access to healthcare?
“No.”

By making sure their land, water, and air aren’t polluted?
“No.”

By making sure their food is safe?
“No.”

By making sure they are safe from physically abusive parents?
“No.”

By making sure they are safe from sexually abusive churches?
“No.”

By making sure they don’t end up a child or teen parent?
“No.”

By making sure they don’t end up as a child bride?
“No.”

By making sure they’re safe from tyrant cops and authority figures?
“No.”

By making sure they have the option to live their lives as a happy queer person?
“That’s it! That’s what we want to protect them from! It’s our choice, not theirs!”

To be fair, Trump is good at talking out both sides of his ass. There are a variety of classic Trump Moves that accomplish it.

The Backwalk #

Go to maximum in the beginning of the sentence, then step it back. E.g.

These Mexicans are Rapists and Murderers and some of them, I suppose, are good people

The Statistics Escalator #

Always offer 3 numbers, getting increasingly crazy, and attribute the last one to nobody. E.g.

Under Biden the real unemployment rate is 8, 10, some even say as high as 15 percent

Schrödinger’s Subjunctive #

Say you never said something but imply you might have, deny again, but imply you agree. E.g.

I never said that, I never said that, but even if I had, it would have been true. I never said that. I would have meant it. But I never said it

So, let’s combine these 3 moves into a powerful Trump combo about trade. Remember, he never said this, but if he did, it would sound a lot like this, and it would be exactly the type of thing he would say. But he never said it:

America is getting ripped off. For too long, ripped off. And we’re not going to get ripped off anymore. Our enemies rip us off, but our friends rip us off even worse. So we’re going to have Tariffs. Tariffs. I love that word. Tariffs. We’ll have big, beautiful tariffs. And we want trade, we want good trade with our friends, we want the best trade and the most trade, but we’ve gotta have tariffs too, we can’t keep getting ripped off. But we’ll have the best trade. And we’ll have tariffs. We’ll have rates at 10, 20 maybe even as high as 100%. And we’re gonna shut down unfair goods from being dumped on our markets. And I never said prices would go up, I never said that, but if I would say that, I think it would be a very temporary thing and soon we’ll find ourselves wealthier than ever before, but I’d never say that. I’d never say that. If I did it would be temporary. Temporary. But I’d never say that.

And there you have it. You can read whatever you want into that. You can take it the Ackman way or the Harris way or both or something in between. Because this is how Trump talks.

Kurt, Dave and Chris:

First let me apologize for taking a couple of days to put this outline together. When I spoke to Kurt I was in the middle of making a Fugazi album, but I thought I would have a day or so between records to sort everything out. My schedule changed unexpectedly, and this is the first moment I’ve had to go through it all. Apology apology.

I think the very best thing you could do at this point is exactly what you are talking about doing: bang a record out in a couple of days, with high quality but minimal “production” and no interference from the front office bulletheads. If that is indeed what you want to do, I would love to be involved.

If, instead, you might find yourselves in the position of being temporarily indulged by the record company, only to have them yank the chain at some point (hassling you to rework songs/sequences/production, calling-in hired guns to “sweeten” your record, turning the whole thing over to some remix jockey, whatever…) then you’re in for a bummer and I want no part of it.

I’m only interested in working on records that legitimately reflect the band’s own perception of their music and existence. If you will commit yourselves to that as a tenet of the recording methodology, then I will bust my ass for you. I’ll work circles around you. I’ll rap your head with a ratchet…

I have worked on hundreds of records (some great, some good, some horrible, a lot in the courtyard), and I have seen a direct correlation between the quality of the end result and the mood of the band throughout the process. If the record takes a long time, and everyone gets bummed and scrutinizes every step, then the recordings bear little resemblance to the live band, and the end result is seldom flattering. Making punk records is definitely a case where more “work” does not imply a better end result. Clearly you have learned this yourselves and appreciate the logic.

About my methodology and philosophy:

1: Most contemporary engineers and producers see a record as a “project,” and the band as only one element of the project. Further, they consider the recordings to be a controlled layering of specific sounds, each of which is under complete control from the moment the note is conceived through the final six. If the band gets pushed around in the process of making a record, so be it; as long as the “project” meets with the approval of the fellow in control.

My approach is exactly the opposite.

I consider the band the most important thing, as the creative entity that spawned both the band’s personality and style and as the social entity that exists 24 hours out of each day. I do not consider it my place to tell you what to do or how to play. I’m quite willing to let my opinions be heard (if I think the band is making beautiful progress or a heaving mistake, I consider it part of my job to tell them) but if the band decides to pursue something, I’ll see that it gets done.

I like to leave room for accidents or chaos. Making a seamless record, where every note and syllable is in place and every bass drum is identical, is no trick. Any idiot with the patience and the budget to allow such foolishness can do it. I prefer to work on records that aspire to greater things, like originality, personality and enthusiasm. If every element of the music and dynamics of a band is controlled by click tracks, computers, automated mixes, gates, samplers and sequencers, then the record may not be incompetent, but it certainly won’t be exceptional. It will also bear very little relationship to the live band, which is what all this hooey is supposed to be about.

2: I do not consider recording and mixing to be unrelated tasks which can be performed by specialists with no continuous involvement. 99 percent of the sound of a record should be established while the basic take is recorded. Your experiences are specific to your records; but in my experience, remixing has never solved any problems that actually existed, only imaginary ones. I do not like remixing other engineer’s recordings, and I do not like recording things for somebody else to remix. I have never been satisfied with either version of that methodology. Remixing is for talentless pussies who don’t know how to tune a drum or point a microphone.

3: I do not have a fixed gospel of stock sounds and recording techniques that I apply blindly to every band in every situation. You are a different band from any other band and deserve at least the respect of having your own tastes and concerns addressed. For example, I love the sound of a boomy drum kit (say a Gretach or Camco) wide open in a big room, especially with a Bonhammy double-headed bass drum and a really painful snare drum. I also love the puke-inducing low end that comes off an old Fender Bassman or Ampeg guitar amp and the totally blown sound of an SVT with broken-in tubes. I also know that those sounds are inappropriate for some songs, and trying to force them is a waste of time. Predicating the recordings on my tastes is as stupid as designing a car around the upholstery. You guys need to decide and then articulate to me what you want to sound like so we don’t come at the record from different directions.

4: Where we record the record is not as important as how it is recorded. If you have a studio you’d like to use, no hag. Otherwise, I can make suggestions. I have a nice 24-track studio in my house (Fugazi were just there, you can ask them how they rate it), and I’m familiar with most of the studios in the Midwest, the East coast and a dozen or so in the UK.

I would be a little concerned about having you at my house for the duration of the whole recording and mixing process if only because you’re celebrities, and I wouldn’t want word getting out in the neighborhood and you guys having to put up with a lot of fan-style bullshit; it would be a fine place to mix the record though, and you can’t beat the vitties.

If you want to leave the details of studio selection, lodgings, etc. up to me, I’m quite happy to sort all that stuff out. If you guys want to sort it out, just lay down the law.

My first choice for an outside recording studio would be a place called Pachyderm in Cannon Falls, Minnesota. It’s a great facility with outstanding acoustics and a totally comfy architect’s wet dream mansion where the band lives during the recordings. This makes everything more efficient. Since everybody is there, things get done and decisions get made a lot faster than if people are out and about in a city someplace. There’s also all the posh shit like a sauna and swimming pool and fireplaces and trout stream and 50 acres and like that. I’ve made a bunch of records there and I’ve always enjoyed the place. It’s also quite inexpensive, considering how great a facility it is.

The only bummer about Pachyderm is that the owners and manager are not technicians, and they don’t have a tech on call. I’ve worked there enough that I can fix just about anything that can go wrong, short of a serious electronic collapse, but I’ve got a guy that I work with a lot (Bob Weston) who’s real good with electronics (circuit design, trouble shooting and building shit on the spot), so if we choose to do it there, he’ll probably come along in my payroll, since he’d be cheap insurance if a power supply blows up or a serious failure occurs in the dead of winter 50 miles from the closest tech. He’s a recording engineer also, so he can be doing some of the more mundane stuff (cataloging tapes, packing stuff up, fetching supplies) while we’re chopping away at the record proper.

Some day I’m going to talk the Jesus Lizard into going up there and we’ll have us a real time. Oh yeah, and it’s the same Neve console the AC/DC album Back in Black was recorded and mixed on, so you know its just got to have the rock.

5: Dough. I explained this to Kurt but I thought I’d better reiterate it here. I do not want and will not take a royalty on any record I record. No points. Period. I think paying a royalty to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible. The band write the songs. The band play the music. It’s the band’s fans who buy the records. The band is responsible for whether it’s a great record or a horrible record. Royalties belong to the band.

I would like to be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it’s worth. The record company will expect me to ask for a point or a point and a half. If we assume three million sales, that works out to 400,000 dollars or so. There’s no fucking way I would ever take that much money. I wouldn’t be able to sleep.

I have to be comfortable with the amount of money you pay me, but it’s your money, and I insist that you be comfortable with it as well. Kurt suggested paying me a chunk which I would consider full payment, and then if you really thought I deserved more, paying me another chunk after you’d had a chance to live with the album for a while. That would be fine, but probably more organizational trouble than it’s worth.

Whatever. I trust you guys to be fair to me and I know you must be familiar with what a regular industry goon would want. I will let you make the final decision about what I’m going to be paid. How much you choose to pay me will not affect my enthusiasm for the record.

Some people in my position would expect an increase in business after being associated with your band. I, however, already have more work than I can handle, and frankly, the kind of people such superficialities will attract are not people I want to work with. Please don’t consider that an issue.

That’s it.

Please call me to go over any of this if it’s unclear.

[Signed]

If a record takes more than a week to make, somebody’s fucking up.

Oi!

Today, and on this same day of each year, man is startled from his deep slumber and stands before the phantoms of the Ages, looking with tearful eyes toward Mount Calvary to witness Jesus the Nazarene nailed on the Cross… But when the day is over and eventide comes, human kinds return and kneel praying before the idols, erected upon every hilltop, every prairie, and every barter of wheat.

Today, the Christian souls ride on the wing of memories and fly to Jerusalem. There they will stand in throngs, beating upon their bosoms, and staring at Him, crowned with a wreath of thorns, stretching His arms before heaven, and looking from behind the veil of Death into the depths of Life…

But when the curtain of night drops over the stage of the day and the brief drama is concluded, the Christians will go back in groups and lie down in the shadow of oblivion between the quilts of ignorance and slothfulness.

On this one day of each year, the philosophers leave their dark caves, and the thinkers their cold cells, and the poets their imaginary arbours, and all stand reverently upon that silent mountain, listening to the voice of a young man saying of His killers, “Oh Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.”

But as dark silence chokes the voices of the light, the philosophers and the thinkers and the poets return to their narrow crevices and shroud their souls with meaningless pages of parchment.

The women who busy themselves in the splendour of Life will bestir themselves today from their cushions to see the sorrowful woman standing before the Cross like a tender sapling before the raging tempest; and when they approach near to her, they will hear a deep moaning and a painful grief.

The young men and women who are racing with the torrent of modern civilization will halt today for a moment, and look backward to see the young Magdalen washing with her tears the blood stains from the feet of a Holy Man suspended between Heaven and Earth; and when their shallow eyes weary of the scene they will depart and soon laugh.

On this day of each year, Humanity wakes with the awakening of Spring, and stands crying below the suffering Nazarene; then she closes her eyes and surrenders herself to a deep slumber. But Spring will remain awake, smiling and progressing until merged into Summer, dressed in scented golden raiment.

Humanity is a mourner who enjoys lamenting the memories and heroes of the Ages… If Humanity were possessed of understanding, there would be rejoicing over their glory. Humanity is like a child standing in glee by a wounded beast. Humanity laughs before the strengthening torrent which carries into oblivion the dry branches of the trees, and sweeps away with determination all things not fastened by strength.

Humanity looks upon Jesus the Nazarene as a poor-born Who suffered misery and humiliation with all of the weak. And He is pitied, for Humanity believes He was crucified painfully… And all that Humanity offers to Him is crying and wailing and lamentation. For centuries Humanity has been worshipping weakness in the person of the Saviour.

The Nazarene was not weak! He was strong and is strong! But the people refuse to heed the true meaning of strength.

Jesus never lived a life of fear, nor did He die suffering or complaining… He lived as a leader; He was crucified as a crusader; He died with a heroism that frightened His killers and tormentors.

Jesus was not a bird with broken wings; He was a raging tempest who broke all crooked wings. He feared not His persecutors nor His enemies. He suffered not before His killers. Free and brave and daring He was. He defied all despots and oppressors. He saw the contagious pustules and amputated them… He muted Evil and He crushed Falsehood and He choked Treachery.

Jesus came not from the heart of the circle of Light to destroy the homes and build upon their ruins the convents and monasteries. He did not persuade the strong man to become a monk or a priest, but He came to send forth upon this earth a new spirit, with power to crumble the foundation of any monarchy built upon human bones and skulls…

He came to demolish the majestic palaces, constructed upon the graves of the weak, and crush the idols, erected upon the bodies of the poor. Jesus was not sent here to teach the people to build magnificent churches and temples amidst the cold wretched huts and dismal hovels… He came to make the human heart a temple, and the soul an altar, and the mind a priest.

These were the missions of Jesus the Nazarene, and these are the teachings for which He was crucified. And if Humanity were wise, she would stand today and sing in strength the song of conquest and the hymn of triumph.

Oh, Crucified Jesus, Who are looking sorrowfully from Mount Calvary at the sad procession of the Ages, and hearing the clamour of the dark nations, and understanding the dreams of Eternity… Thou art, on the Cross, more glorious and dignified than one thousand kings upon one thousand thrones in one thousand empires…

Thou art, in the agony of death, more powerful than one thousand generals in one thousand wars…

With Thy sorrows, Thou art more joyous than Spring with its flowers…

With Thy suffering, Thou art more bravely silent than the crying angels of heaven…

Before Thy lashers, Thou art more resolute than the mountain of rock…

Thy wreath of thorns is more brilliant and sublime than the crown of Bahram… The nails piercing Thy hands are more beautiful than the sceptre of Jupiter…

The spatters of blood upon Thy feet are more resplendent than the necklace of Ishtar.

Forgive the weak who lament Thee today, for they do not know how to lament themselves…

Forgive them, for they do not know that Thou has conquered death with death, and bestowed life upon the dead…

Forgive them, for they do not know that Thy strength still awaits them…

Forgive them, for they do not know that every day is Thy day.

Amen

A collection of free market, small government, pro-life stories from Iowa, a state run by Republicans (our Democrats being virtually non-existent apropos policy or presence). They’re very Iowa Nice and project plenty of lovely European Christian values and Midwestern Common Sense™.

2025 #

The new president of the Iowa Board of Regents said universities he oversees are too liberal and should have more conservative ideas during the University of Iowa’s new Center for Intellectual Freedom’s first event Friday.

The panel, titled “What is wrong with universities?”, featured speakers who said universities, administrators, and teachers are too liberal. The event at the Old Capitol included regents and speakers from outside Iowa.

Graduate student and teaching assistant Clara Reynen was in the crowd watching the event. She said the Center for Intellectual Freedom is a thinly veiled attempt to force a conservative agenda on public higher education.

“They aren’t interested in making sure that universities a place where there can be open inquiry and discussion, they’re really more interested in furthering their own goals,” Reynen said.

I, for one, thoroughly trust the impartiality of any Conservative project that employs the words “Values”, “Freedom”, and “Liberty”.

---

New rankings from LeapFrog put Iowa at 48th in the nation for hospital safety.

The nonprofit that focuses on patient safety looked at 30 Iowa hospitals that had sufficient publicly-available data to rank them on 32 measures of patient safety, including infection rates, surgery problems and staff communication and responsiveness. It’s the latest round of the group’s semi-annual ratings, which are released in the spring and fall.

Iowa landed at the bottom of its hospital safety list for fall 2025, along with North Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming. All four states had no hospitals that received an “A” rating.

“That’s not a new trend in Iowa. I did look at a few past rounds, and there’s been a lack of ‘A’ safety grades in the state,” said Katie Stewart, LeapFrog’s director of health care ratings.

---

“It was human error, but I’m sure as soon as the command staff find out about it, they’re going to have some meetings with their supervisors internally and be like, ‘Hey, guys, we gotta keep our thumb on this, this is silly,’”

---

A recent Moody’s Analytics analysis lists Iowa and 21 other states as in a recession or on the precipice of one, and Iowa State economist Peter Orazem says our state’s economy has been sluggish dating back to 2018. […] Like much of the Midwest, Iowa’s agriculture and manufacturing industries have been impacted by tariffs. […] owa’s aging demographic, lack of workers and a decline in financial sector jobs are the longstanding contributors to our sluggish economy, Orazem says. Iowa has long had “brain drain” as young, college graduates leave the state, shrinking our skilled workforce. […] Their problems are driven largely by a mix of more recent issues like slowing immigration, increasing tariffs and federal job cuts, Zandi argues.

Improving international trade relations and helping more immigrants live and work in Iowa could help, Orazem says.

“We haven’t exactly rolled out the red carpet,” Orazem says.

---

Iowa’s economy shrank by 0.5% in 2024, making it the second-worst performing state in the country, according to new data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. The contraction in real gross domestic product (GDP), adjusted for inflation, placed Iowa 49th among all states, ahead of only North Dakota.

The state also ranked 48th in personal income growth at 2.4%, ahead of only Nebraska and North Dakota, and had the second-slowest job growth nationwide in 2024 at -0.6 %, trailing only the U.S. Virgin Islands.

“Our biggest problem is still a weakness in our labor supply. We don’t have enough workers,” Orazem said. “Certainly if you look at the last 10 years or so, most of the attention paid on the political side has not been related to making Iowa a better place to live.”

They’re very welcoming (because they’re Christians) and very good with money (because they’re Conservative).

---

“I feel like we’ve got bigger issues in the state, and it’s like—wherever you are on these social issues—they should not be the highest concern for state government in my opinion right now.”

But it went beyond that. Another student, Isaac, mentioned that it wasn’t just white-collar professionals who wanted to leave because of bad legislation.

“I already know that state employees aren’t allowed to strike. And if Iowa becomes a lot more hostile against worker protections, I could see a lot of people that get trained in trades and such leaving the state,” he said.

Other students mentioned a lack of amenities, the state’s abysmal mental health care system, and abortion rights getting chipped away.

---

Iowa Board of Regents tries banning university courses that teach about social justice.

---

Iowa ranks first in the percentage of homes that have radon levels at or above the Environmental Protection Agency’s accepted level.

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Iowa DOGE floats performance-based pay for teachers and eliminating IPERS for new state hires.

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At an Iowa Pork Plant, Piles of Dead Pigs and Wafting Sulphur Dioxide.

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Iowa Gov. Reynolds: Regulation not the answer to addressing state’s water quality woes
Reynolds defended farmers and the state’s investment in conservation practices
https://www.thegazette.com/state-government/iowa-gov-reynolds-regulation-not-the-answer-to-addressing-states-water-quality-woes/

---

Republican Miller-Meeks runs away after being asked about voting to gut Medicaid to pay for massive tax cuts for the billionaires.

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Senator Dismisses Medicaid Cuts Killing People: ‘Well, We’re All Going to Die’. She then posts a sarcastic apology video following this comment. Rob Sand then posted this.

---

“Half the families we serve are already skipping meals,” Iowa food banks react to tariff impacts.

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Iowa Governor Signs Bill Banning DEI.

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Republicans file SC3 to overturn same sex marriage.

---

Iowa immigrant group is alarmed by a state lawmaker’s demand for confidential information on “the nonprofit’s clients, donors and members”.

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Iowa Leads the Nation in 2025 Farm Bankruptcies.

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“Iowa schools would have to show students in health classes a video depicting the stages of pregnancy but any materials created by an organization that performs or promotes abortions would be forbidden” a bill just passed by the Iowa house. This would be banning information from the Mayo Clinic and The University of Iowa.

---

First-term State Representative Brett Barker has acknowledged he made a “rookie mistake” when he authorized the distribution of a right-wing Christian pamphlet to all of his Iowa House colleagues. Barker told Bleeding Heartland he didn’t read the publication by Capitol Ministries before it was circulated in the chamber on March 19.

But Barker has not publicly disavowed the contents of the weekly “Bible Study,” which portrays political adversaries as tools of Satan, calls on believers to “evangelize their colleagues,” depicts same-sex marriage and LGBTQ existence as “satanic perversions,” and condemns “women’s liberation” as a “scheme of the devil.”

---

Iowa Senate passes bill banning citizens’ police review boards.

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Iowa Republicans advance public school Bible study bill. “It’s hard to imagine a person being regarded as educated unless they have at least a working knowledge of the Bible,” Jaynes said.

---

Federal funds canceled for University of Iowa’s International Writing Program:

The program is highly selective. It has hosted only 1,625 writers from 160 countries throughout its lifetime. Three have received the Nobel Prize in Literature — most recently, Han Kang of South Korea, who won the award for her poetry in 2024 However, due to the funding cuts, the number of writers in next fall’s residency will shrink by half.

---

Iowa Republicans’ bill to criminalize vaccine providers advances amid funnel week chaos.

---

Iowa Republicans advance a bill limiting protests held outside of the Iowa Capitol.

---

Iowa continues to have one of the highest rates of new cancer diagnoses in the country, according to the annual Cancer in Iowa report by the Iowa Cancer Registry. Iowa remains second in the nation, behind Kentucky, for the rate of new cancers, according to the report’s age-adjusted data.

---

Iowa lawmakers became the first in the nation to approve legislation removing gender identity protections from the state’s civil rights code Thursday, despite massive protests by opponents who say it could expose transgender people to discrimination in numerous areas of life.

2024 #

Iowa generated the highest number of vote-change queries, specifically in Des Moines-Ames and Cedar Rapids-Waterlook-Iowa City and Dubuque areas.

---

A large decline in students and rising costs are leading the Des Moines Public School District to consider closing schools and altering its boundaries.

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Brenna Bird joins other Republican AGs to threaten the American Academy of Pediatrics over its support for transgender young people.

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Iowa House lawmakers OK $3M grant program to help buy guns for teachers, pay for training.

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Gov. Reynolds rejects millions in aid for food-insecure Iowa families (again), instead asking feds to fund her own ‘monthly box’ program.

Last December, Reynolds announced Iowa would not participate in this year’s Summer EBT for Children program. The program provides an extra $40 a month per child during the three months of school vacation to families whose kids qualify for free or reduced price meals at school. Food insecurity among school-age children spikes during summer months when they no longer have regular access to meals at school.

The $900,000 the governor allocated for the grant program amounted to 3.1 percent of the $29 million that would have been available through the Summer EBT program. According to the the nonprofit Iowa Hunger Coalition (IHC), the federal program would have covered 240,000 children in the state. In contrast, during the summer of 2023, the average number of children who ate on a daily basis at one of the summer meal sites the grant program was aimed at was 21,557. According to the governor’s office, the grant program resulted in the creation of a total of 61 new meal sites around the state this summer.

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Iowa GOP chair calls it ‘blatantly antisemitic’ for Kamala Harris to pick Tim Walz as running mate during Cedar Rapids event.

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An Iowa farm county seeks answers amid cancer rates 50% higher than national average.

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Republican farmers in Iowa say they want Donald Trump as their president, buoyed by the historic sums of money his administration handed out to farms and despite his talk of trade wars that could tank already stifled U.S. agricultural exports.

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Iowa Republicans pass personhood bill that critics say could threaten IVF care.

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Experts have known for decades that industrial-scale concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are water polluters. Yet over the past 30-plus years, the number of large CAFOs in Iowa has more than quintupled.

---

Republicans are redefining the word ‘equal’ in an Iowa anti-trans bill.

When the sponsor was asked directly what the word “equal” means in this bill, the representative Heather Hora answered: “Equal would mean … um … I would assume that equal would mean … I don’t know exactly in this context.” If the bill’s own sponsor cannot define the word “equal” due to eliminating the word’s actual definition, how can she claim to have created the perfect definition for “man” or “woman” in Iowa law?

2023 #

Hog Poop from Iowa Is Polluting Your Water.

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Senators rewrite bill to restrict research of meat substitutes.

A copy of the amended bill was not immediately publicly available, but Sen. Dawn Driscoll, R-Williamsburg, said in the committee meeting that the new version “prohibits the Board of Regents from conducting research into the production or use of manufactured protein products.”

“Lab grown products are made in a petri dish and are not the same as the high-quality beef, pork, poultry, goat, lamb raised by hardworking Iowa farm families,” Driscoll said. “The taxpayer dollars should not be used to support these products over the real meat raised on Iowa farms.”

Because competition is a good thing.

2021 #

At the Iowa Statehouse. Via State Senator Joe Bolkcom.

2020 #

Reynolds said election victories for Republicans in the state this week show Iowans support her approach. “It was a validation of our balanced response to COVID-19, one that is mindful of both public health and economic health,” Reynolds said.

Because political victories, not cases or deaths, should inform and ‘validate’ one’s strategy when dealing with a raging pandemic.

---

Informed Choice Iowa is a group that “unites Iowans seeking to preserve their medical freedoms.” They are “pro-science” folk that count “ex-vaxxers”, “selective vaxxers”, “non-vaxxers”, and “vaxxers” among their members. I’m guessing that this list doesn’t include a single practicing physician.

And here’s them celebrating their freedoms, by which they mean a blatant disregard for the science they claim to love and the Iowans they claim to serve. Need confirmation but I hear that eating at least two tubes of toothpaste is on the agenda for their next idiot congregation. Here’s a local news story about this superspreader event. More on this tantrum by The Des Moines Register.

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“Republican legislator wants to track Iowa women that are searching online for abortion services in order to dissuade them”.

“Iowa’s House speaker said he can’t make lawmakers wear masks — but he did enforce a ban on jeans”

“Iowa is ranked 47th in COVID-19 vaccine supply. Gov. Kim Reynolds wants to know why”

“Lawmaker introduces bill to ban transgender youth from getting gender-affirming care, says kids ‘will outgrow’ being transgender”

“Iowa lawmakers push to bring back death penalty” #priorities

“Iowa governor’s bill would reduce public school funding by millions, analysis says”

https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-iowa-republicans-to-stop-the-attack-on-unemployment-benefits

https://www.sierraclub.org/iowa/blog/2021/02/voter-suppression-bills-racing-through-iowas-legislature#.YDTwKvZLuHU.facebook

The lovely Christians running our state government refused to provide shelter to unaccompanied migrant children noting that it was the “President’s problem”. Just like Jesus would’ve done.

Representative Carter Nordman
I am extremely proud that Governor Kim Reynolds signed HF 847 last night that included my Pledge of Allegiance in schools bill. Starting next school year, all public schools will begin leading their students in the pledge each day! 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸

https://old.reddit.com/r/Iowa/comments/olqkq7/reminder_you_dont_have_to_participate_in_the/h5gu7ux/

• Our Governor wants schools to tell “both sides” of a genocide
  https://www.carrollspaper.com/news/can-black-hawk-s-horror-story-be-told-in-kim-reynolds-iowa/article_7384476e-cce8-11eb-8627-db53fe900235.html

Why Iowa has only given out 2% of $195 million rent aid — and won’t apply for more federal funds

Iowa Finance Authority Director Debi Durham says she takes full responsibility ->5 secs later “I would tell you the majority of it is not our fault,” Durham said.

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2021/06/24/kim-reynolds-send-iowa-state-patrol-troopers-us-mexico-southern-border-crisis-biden-immigration/7777946002/
https://siouxcityjournal.com/news/state-and-regional/iowa-officials-mostly-mum-on-plans-to-send-troopers-to-border/article_5950487b-e356-551e-855d-340114e21069.html
Several Republican governors, including Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, announced they would sent troopers from their states to help protect the border — noting the “rise in drugs, human trafficking and violent crime has become unsustainable.” But Iowa officials will answer few questions beyond that about the deployment. -->

Governor blasts ‘wokeness’
https://www.radioiowa.com/2021/07/16/governor-reynolds-blasts-wokeness-of-biden-administration/

https://www.iowapublicradio.org/state-government-news/2021-07-26/state-democrats-call-on-gov-reynolds-to-fill-state-board-of-health-vacancies

Iowa lawmakers are talking about adding possible legislation to an already planned special session to stop private businesses requiring employees to get COVID-19 vaccines.
https://www.kcci.com/article/iowa-republicans-discussing-legislation-to-stop-companies-from-requiring-covid-19vaccines/37142966

https://www.kcci.com/article/governor-kim-reynolds-provides-update-on-iowa-state-patrol-troopers-deployed-to-us-border/37155372
https://www.cato.org/immigration-research-policy-brief/criminal-immigrants-texas-2019

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2021/07/27/iowa-gov-kim-reynolds-criticizes-new-cdc-covid-19-indoor-mask-guidance-vaccinated/5387502001/

https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2021/08/09/the-reynolds-administration-is-the-least-transparent-in-30-years/

https://www.iowapublicradio.org/ipr-news/2021-08-18/university-faculty-call-for-mask-vaccine-mandates-ahead-of-fall-semester
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/education/k-12/2021/08/20/university-iowa-will-not-require-masks-after-iowa-city-mandate-issued/8209079002/

https://www.kcci.com/article/doug-jensen-capitol-riot-return-to-jail/37360489

https://old.reddit.com/r/desmoines/comments/patc67/ankenys_mysterious_antimask_mailers_bullies/
https://old.reddit.com/r/desmoines/comments/pamxf4/sent_to_an_ankeny_school_board_member_story/
https://www.axios.com/ankeny-school-board-anti-mask-vaccine-mail-7d1e14d0-d213-4a2c-aa4d-265ad45048a7.html
https://old.reddit.com/r/Iowa/comments/p7j883/this_morning_we_were_reminded_in_an_assembly_for/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Iowa/comments/peu0r3/kim_reynolds_with_ankeny_school_board_candidate/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Iowa/comments/ph9cdl/marshalltown_er_doctor_there_are_no_icus_in_the/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Iowa/comments/ph4oel/covid_in_schools_is_this_really_how_its_supposed/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Iowa/comments/pg5v24/the_iowa_border_according_to_kim_reynolds/

https://old.reddit.com/r/desmoines/comments/pbstix/covid_in_schools_here_we_go_btw_the be_poster_noted/

https://www.kcrg.com/2021/09/10/iowa-sheriff-says-he-will-not-mandate-covid-19-vaccine-employees/

https://mobile.twitter.com/iastartingline/status/1440486539595632640
https://old.reddit.com/r/Iowa/comments/ps5u1i/this_state_is_a_fucking_joke/hdoc2v7/

https://www.kcci.com/article/kim-reynolds-joe-biden-legal-action-vaccine-mandate/38029274

https://www.kwwl.com/news/top-stories/gov-reynolds-hopes-to-push-unemployed-iowans-to-work-with-new-rules/article_39ddfa83-f112-5e03-8766-fb856a25ccf6.html

https://reddit.com/r/Iowa/comments/qeiona/iowa_drops_from_6_in_to_24_in_p12_education_in_4/
https://www.iowapublicradio.org/state-government-news/2021-10-28/iowa-legislature-passes-a-bill-to-expand-covid-19-vaccine-exemptions-for-workers

https://www.thegazette.com/employment/iowa-workforce-shortage-persists-months-after-state-ended-extra-jobless-aid/
But since those states stopped the extra aid, the workforce shortage remains. Workforces in the 25 states that maintained the extra federal benefits until the program expired in September have seen better workforce growth than the states that ended the extra benefits early, according to an analysis of state-by-state data by the Associated Press.
“Policymakers were pinning too many hopes on ending unemployment insurance as a labor market boost,” Fiona Greig, managing director of the JPMorgan Chase Institute, which used bank account data to study the issue, told the AP. “The work disincentive effects were clearly small.”
In Iowa, Gov. Kim Reynolds cut off the extra benefits effective June 12.
“Now that our businesses and schools have reopened, these payments are discouraging people from returning to work,” she said at the time.

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2021/11/30/covid-19-iowa-hospitals-no-longer-tracking-home-county-patients/8814638002/

The department is trying to ease hospital reporting requirements because Iowa hospitals are facing staffing shortages, she said.

Dr. Megan Srinivas, an Iowa-based infectious disease physician and public health researcher, expressed concern about the policy change because it hampers local public health efforts and reduces transparency for the general public.

“Home county is a key factor in tracking outbreaks and enabling appropriate public health mitigation in a timely manner,” she said.

---

https://twitter.com/jetsjets/status/1479453754969640964/photo/1

So the voters can’t be trusted, the poll workers can’t be trusted the voting machines can’t be trusted, the media can’t be trusted, Bill Barr can’t be trusted, the guy who was in charge of election security can’t be trusted, the appellate courts can’t be trusted, and the Supreme Court can’t be trusted.

But Donald Trump can be trusted.

Roll that around in your head for about 3 minutes and realize how incredibly mind-bogglingly stupid that sounds.

https://iowastartingline.com/2021/11/29/the-problem-with-jake-chapmans-obscenity-claim/

---

https://iowastartingline.com/2022/01/11/business-reynolds-highlighted-closed-for-covid/

“Unlike so many states, Iowa’s economy stayed open, and so did Grace on Main,” Reynolds said tonight.

The Shelby County pizza place, however, is closed for the time being.

“Michael is still recovering from COVID,” read the restaurant’s update.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Iowa/comments/s31g9b/iowa_if_you_enjoy_being_the_laughing_stock_of_the/

https://www.kcci.com/article/iowa-governor-kim-reynolds-push-to-use-state-funds-for-private-school-scholarships/38751397

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-business-health-iowa-legislature-4568e82e95b9528929af7472cbbdb5ff

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/02/iowa-republican-introduces-bill-to-put-cameras-in-every-public-school-classroom/

https://www.bleedingheartland.com/2022/02/04/a-storms-coming-its-time-to-act/

https://old.reddit.com/r/desmoines/comments/sl9ay9/nbd_just_a_johnston_school_board_member_talking/

https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/briefs/bill-would-charge-teachers-administrators-with-serious-misdemeanor-for-obscene-content/

https://www.radioiowa.com/2022/05/25/senator-ernst-proposes-giving-border-wall-materials-to-states/

---

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https://espnsiouxfalls.com/sioux-city-bandits-to-giveaway-ar-15-gun-at-upcoming-game/
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/sports/football/2022/06/01/sioux-city-bandits-indoor-football-iowa-ar-15-assault-rifle-raffle-giveaway/7476718001/
“Children die and to make it about a team in Sioux City, giving away an AR-15, to have some sort of connection to that is just absurd,” Bond said. “To make this a political opportunity for people who have an agenda is absurd.”

https://iowastartingline.com/2022/06/02/anger-on-gun-violence-boils-over-at-grassley-town-hall/

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/education/2015/05/10/iowa-student-brain-drain/26999519/

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2022/06/28/new-iowa-laws-start-july-1-unemployment-cuts-garbage-searches/7714093001/

https://twitter.com/ChrisGloninger/status/1548382916085817344

Regent warns ISU to allow free speech in the teaching of climate science
https://cedarrapidsgazette-ia.newsmemory.com/?publink=1b4c3695a_134855c

https://apnews.com/article/abortion-us-supreme-court-health-iowa-66b51456b20d4a294bd5b0547052a5e3

https://www.axios.com/local/des-moines/2022/10/04/iowa-brain-drain-cost-state-college-educated-adults?stream=top

https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2022/10/12/iowa-to-dramatically-cut-back-on-restaurant-inspections/

Iowa research universities slip in U.S. News global rankings
https://www.thegazette.com/higher-education/iowa-research-universities-slip-in-u-s-news-global-rankings/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Iowa/comments/yhnn6q/dorman_oped_kim_reynolds_aces_a_course_in/iuesp0p/

https://nurse.org/articles/iowa-governor-kim-reynolds-nurses/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Iowa/comments/yriu1y/iowans_voted_for_incompetence_iowa_will_not/
https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2022/11/09/iowa-will-not-receive-30-million-in-federal-aid-for-child-care/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Iowa/comments/ywga94/daycare_in_iowa/
https://old.reddit.com/r/Iowa/comments/ywga94/daycare_in_iowa/iwlupwv/
https://old.reddit.com/r/Iowa/comments/ywrvc6/iowa_gov_kim_reynolds_says_no_to_federal_child/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Iowa/comments/107t9o3/republican_iowa_legislative_leaders_support/
https://www.iowapublicradio.org/state-government-news/2023-01-09/whitver-grassley-say-they-support-private-school-scholarships-without-family-income-limits

Party of Small Government
https://old.reddit.com/r/Iowa/comments/109a0z6/iowa_legislature_proposes_outing_trans_kids_to/

Citing a ‘culture war,’ Senate panel advances bill to repeal gender-balance law
https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2023/01/18/citing-a-culture-war-senate-panel-advances-bill-to-repeal-gender-balance-law/

Gadsden Plate
https://www.legis.iowa.gov/legislation/BillBook?ga=90&ba=SF 47

Christian Behaviour:
What are the real reasons for policies like the one we see in Iowa?
Research points to political ideology, perceptions of the poor as being undeserving, and a comfort with a paternalism, preferring intrusive bureaucracies to direct support.
https://twitter.com/donmoyn/status/1617521036811210752

A new Iowa bill would roll back child labor laws, allowing 14 to 17-year-olds to work in mining, meatpacking, demolition, operating guillotine shears, and other dangerous jobs. Under the business-backed bill, employers wouldn’t be civilly liable if kids are injured or killed.
https://twitter.com/moreperfectus/status/1622972009708912649
https://lyz.substack.com/p/marriage-is-not-a-replacement-for?r=actj0
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/business/2023/02/06/key-points-of-bill-to-change-iowa-child-labor-law/69870761007/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/11/us-child-labor-laws-violations

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2023/02/mike-pence-group-to-launch-ads-attacking-trans-children-in-iowa-ahead-of-primaries/

GOP lawmakers propose amending Iowa Constitution to ban gay marriage
https://cbs2iowa.com/news/local/gop-lawmakers-propose-amending-iowa-constitution-to-ban-gay-marriage

20 House Republicans Sign Bill To Ban Nearly All Abortion In Iowa
https://iowastartingline.com/2023/02/28/20-house-republicans-sign-bill-to-ban-nearly-all-abortion-in-iowa/

Both these were around the time Iowa Democrats introed a bill to legalize pot. There was a “both sides political theater” argument. Not the same. For obvious fucking reasons

We’re not talking about making sure Iowans have extensive and affordable healthcare. We’re not talking about water quality, CAFOs, loss of habitat for our wildlife. We’re not talking about making sure Iowa workers have paid leave, living wages, parental leave, adequate work-life balance. We’re not talking about affordable housing. We’re not talking about affordable higher education.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Iowa/comments/11hhx77/with_antilgbtq_laws_and_drag_show_bans_being/jatmxoz/

Ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors heads to Reynolds’ desk
https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2023/03/08/ban-on-gender-affirming-care-for-transgender-minors-heads-to-reynolds-desk/

62% of Iowans oppose Gov. Kim Reynolds’ private school scholarships law, Iowa Poll finds
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/iowa-poll/2023/03/19/iowa-poll-kim-reynolds-private-school-accounts-opposed-by-majority/69989541007/
https://old.reddit.com/r/Iowa/comments/11vjofa/62_of_iowans_oppose_gov_kim_reynolds_private/

‘I’m going to have to use the girls bathroom’: Transgender dads concerned about implications of ‘bathroom bill’
https://www.weareiowa.com/article/news/local/iowa-bathroom-bill-transgender-students-lgbtq-parents-controversy-impact-implications/524-78924d49-e001-4ba2-b076-87b2744eba80

Iowa’s corrupt governor ends her own illegal deal.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Iowa/comments/121ab7k/iowas_corrupt_governor_ends_her_own_illegal_deal/jdm2kdy/

“Iowa on the list: One in four college applicants avoids entire states for political reasons”
https://old.reddit.com/r/Iowa/comments/129ldum/iowa_on_the_list_one_in_four_college_applicants/
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3926811-one-in-four-college-applicants-avoids-entire-states-for-political-reasons/
https://www.artsci.com/studentpoll-volume-16-issue-1

Bring your guns to school. Why the fuck not?
https://old.reddit.com/r/Iowa/comments/12n45v6/bring_your_guns_to_school_house_vote_protest/

Rob Sand hobbled by the House
https://www.kcci.com/amp/article/iowa-house-approves-bill-that-would-place-restrictions-on-state-auditors-office/43662535#amp_tf=From %251%24s&aoh=16821196956338&csi=0&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com
https://old.reddit.com/r/Iowa/comments/12unmdg/i_cant_believe_theyre_getting_away_with_this_rob/

Iowa legislature passes bill restricting state auditor’s access to records
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/04/27/iowa-state-legislator-auditor-republicans/

Iowa’s new private school scholarship program has ‘lack of oversight’, state auditor says
https://www.kcci.com/article/iowa-new-private-school-scholarship-program-has-lack-of-oversight-state-auditor-says/43981314

Our Governor on her Daddy’s Indictment
https://www.kwwl.com/news/politics/governor-reynolds-responds-to-trump-indictment/article_a431ea40-06ef-11ee-9381-6f80029b732e.html
https://preview.redd.it/asoz7ft2w15b1.jpg?auto=webp&v=enabled&s=3b17c4a0559a8e799369ffa49c641becfdfb2014

Gov. Kim Reynolds sent a letter this past week to President Joe Biden seeking federal help in dealing with the aftermath of the tragic apartment building collapse in Davenport.
And she didn’t refer to him as a “radical socialist” even once. The restraint is admirable.
https://www.thegazette.com/staff-columnists/iowa-lacks-the-capacity-in-so-many-ways/
https://old.reddit.com/r/Iowa/comments/146t8j3/always_fun_to_watch_kimmy_suck_the_govt_teat_when/

“Roast and Ride”
Pence later told the Roast and Ride crowd, "I rode, and I roasted.”
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/elections/2023/06/03/ernsts-roast-and-ride-draws-8-presidential-hopefuls-and-lots-of-pork/70285059007/

https://www.hrc.org/news/iowa-passed-law-prohibiting-hiv-education-school-curriculum

This County Chose an Election Denier, 9/11 Truther, and QAnon Conspiracist to Run Its Elections
https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d994q/this-county-chose-an-election-denier-911-truther-and-qanon-conspiracist-to-run-its-elections

Moms for Liberty
https://old.reddit.com/r/Iowa/comments/14gomuj/moms_for_liberty_the_group_kim_reynolds_is/
https://www.indystar.com/story/news/2023/06/21/moms-for-liberty-hamilton-county-indiana-quotes-hitler-in-newsletter/70344659007/

Yes, Iowa Republicans filed a bill to ban same-sex marriage. No, it’s not going anywhere.
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2023/03/01/iowa-gay-marriage-ban-bill-introduced-republicans-wont-pass/69958038007/
One male and one female
https://www.legis.iowa.gov/legislation/BillBook?ba=HJR8&ga=90

Mark Rissi, Cedar Rapids, arrested for threats
https://arizona.votebeat.org/2023/8/29/23850868/mark-rissi-prison-sentence-arizona-election-worker-threats

US Dept. of Labor confirms Iowa’s new child labor law violates federal law
https://www.kcrg.com/2023/09/01/us-dept-labor-confirms-iowas-new-child-labor-law-violates-federal-law/

House Republicans vote to immediately ban guaranteed income programs in Iowa, before results from the first study are known
https://littlevillagemag.com/house-republicans-vote-to-end-ubi-study-early/

Sixteen attorneys general tell YouTube to stop ‘targeting pro-life messages’
https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/briefs/sixteen-attorneys-general-tell-youtube-to-stop-targeting-pro-life-messages/

Party of Principles Governor endorses rapist insurrection fomentor with 91 indictments.
https://twitter.com/KimReynoldsIA/status/1765501182812848379

Iowa House Democrats protest ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ license plate proposal
https://www.kcrg.com/2024/03/07/iowa-house-democrats-protest-dont-tread-me-license-plate-proposal/

Iowa legislator: I’d ban all plant-based meat products from Iowa if I could
https://iowastartingline.com/2024/03/06/iowa-legislator-id-ban-all-plant-based-meat-products-from-iowa-if-i-could/

Says woman whose office is currently in court trying to make it harder for non-English speakers to vote.
https://twitter.com/timothymnel/status/1737511715544146413?s=20

Water quality
https://www.thegazette.com/guest-columnists/iowas-leaders-have-failed-us-on-water-quality/

Get over shooting
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/06/donald-trump-iowa-school-shooting
They had an SRO
https://www.raccoonvalleyradio.com/2022/12/26/perry-school-board-renews-contract-for-school-resource-officer/
Reddit thread
https://old.reddit.com/r/Iowa/comments/18yecpe/active_shooter_perry_high_school_dallas_county/

https://twitter.com/KimReynoldsIA/status/1754580301064409418

Iowa Republicans unveil latest plan to arm teachers with guns
https://iowastartingline.com/2024/02/07/iowa-republicans-unveil-latest-plan-to-arm-teachers-with-guns/

Iowa lawmakers advance bill to define ‘man’ and ‘woman’
https://www.kcrg.com/2024/02/06/house-education-committee-advances-bill-set-gender-definitions/

Proposed legislation would strip Iowa’s watershed management authorities of water quality efforts
https://www.thegazette.com/state-government/proposed-legislation-would-iowas-strip-watershed-management-authorities-of-water-quality-efforts/

I will not tire of Petrostate Project updates. Here’s another video by the same guy on their ill-fated “Line in the Desert” project.

Its trailer is worth a watch and is one of those “Do people actually fall for this shit?” kinda things.

There’s also a failed Economic City and a Bridge Hotel. There are several more. They appear to be adopting a spray-and-pray strategy with the trillions they have.

I will admit to being just a bit sour at not being able to enrich myself (and retire early) by bullshitting smug multi-billionaires as thoroughly as the architects and consultants¹ who conceived of these impractical, wasteful, and hilariously gauche unnecessities. Like I wish I could’ve worked on that Bridge Hotel to regale people with how I literally sold a bridge to someone. And imagine being a rich architect whose shitty buildings only exist on your laptop (and mercifully so).

I maintain that the India/Pakistan rivalry in Cricket is the greatest in sport, even though I don’t watch many sports¹.

I’m also certainly not one of those toxic and rabid South Asian cricket fans but I am decidedly and healthily Team India. So I had to watch this.

The documentary is mostly set in the late 90s and early 2000s. These are decades I consider ‘golden’ in Indian Cricket for two reason: (1) I was much younger than I am right now and (2) I miss watching these amazing matches with my family and school and college friends.

Sort of like if Girl with The Dragon Tattoo met an Agatha Christie whodunnit.

I am not sure how a 27-yeat old Gen Z’er like Bill is basically the wisest person anyone’s met. Especially with the insipid art installations. The soundtrack is absolutely apt and excellent. Javed Khan looks like Dev Patel’s older brother.

I don’t get the fasciantiona nd adoration of Bill. The most basic boring, plain dude. Rice flour has more character. He’s got cool tattoos. Doesn’t say much and when he does, it’s all awkward. I don’t get it. Mumblegrumbler.

The soundtrack is about as sublime as Devs.

I decided to log into my old Twitter account after many years on a whim. I follow no one and have 39 followers.

I saw nothing on my feed but its owner’s boosted posts, a ton of crypto content, Pepe and anti-woke incendiaries, and heavily lopsided political ragebait.

It felt like looking through my Spam folder for a misclassified message. Like ending up on one of those SEO-optimized AI-generated websites that exist to make their owners ad impression money. The internet can certainly be a pretty noisy place but in the case of Twitter Under New Management, it’s the same set of signals weakened by a maddening amount of noise.

I can perhaps understand why but I remain unsure of how people continue to use this thing.

And it might never be. But it’s certainly up to us.

Love a good Ian Hislop interview. I wish LBC’d publish the entire thing but the few snippets they have are well-worth a listen.

It’s home to a mere 57,000 people and costs $1.7 Trillion.

BTW: That’s one of my favorite websites on the internet, especially when I watch people play “Geography Tetris” with trying to fit as many countries as they can into Africa 🌍

Being an epithet I was honored with by a roommate and best friend. I then came by this poem and recitation by Pakistani poet Munir Niazi and

Fruit near me

Hamesha der kar deta hoon mein

Zaruri baat kehni ho
Koi wadaa nibhaana ho
Usay awaaz deni ho
Usay wapas bulaana ho
Hamesha der kar deta hoon mein

Madad karni ho uski
Yar ki dharas bandhani ho
Bohat dereena raston par
Kisi se milny jaana ho
Hamesha der kar deta hoon mein

Badaltay mausamon ki ser main dil ko lagaana ho
Kisi ko yaad rakhna ho
Kisi ko bhool jaana ho
Hamesha der kar deta hoon mein

Kisi ko maut se pehlay
Kisi gham se bachaana ho
Haqiqat aur thi kuch
Us ko jaa ke yeh bataana ho

Hamesha der kar deta hoon mein

And it’s as fantastically unmoderated as the last few! Features all the uninformed, hysterical, xenophobic, nationalist arguments by Very Smart Techbros.

including this absolute banger:

Racists aren’t irrational actors or evil people. They simply have higher affinity for their tribe, and that’s okay. Sometimes it takes for self-interests to be threatened, for bigoted & tribal behaviors to manifest in a loud manner. Again, that’s okay. Americans are the ones who gave a negative connotation to to words like bigot and racists. In the rest of world, tribal & bigoted behaviors are an accepted norm. We’re all racists sometimes. But, American tech workers are definitely at their racist-est on h1b threads.

“Your honor, I’m not a killer. I simply have a higher affinity for violence. And that’s okay.”¹

Heck, even Sergey Brin doesn’t get a Good Immigrant cookie:

My understanding is Sergey was just along for the ride and Larry was the one with the unique insights (pagerank) and led Google through the early years as CEO.

As a person who’s both benefitted and suffered under the H1-B, I don’t think I’d be alone if I said that it’s in dire need of reform and not the "regulatory theater that I’d see with each administration. The system is broken and only serves upper management and shareholders.

No idea that PTA had directed a lot of videos for Yorke and Radiohead.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10516984/

Chaplin, dystopia, conformance, love uber-alles, Czech Republic, France, Ninja Shoes (look it up), Inception style stage (look it up). I think you could set the video to “Daydreaming” and achieve similar results¹.

Let’s lay it right on the line. Bigotry and racism are among the deadliest social ills plaguing the world today. But, unlike a team of costumed super-villains, they can’t be halted with a punch in the snoot, or a zap from a ray gun. The only way to destroy them is to expose them—to reveal them for the insidious evils they really are. The bigot is an unreasoning hater—one who hates blindly, fanatically, indiscriminately. If his hang-up is black men, he hates ALL black men. If a redhead once offended him, he hates ALL redheads. If some foreigner beat him to a job, he’s down on ALL foreigners. He hates people he’s never seen—people he’s never known—with equal intensity—with equal venom.

Now, we’re not trying to say it’s unreasonable for one human being to bug another. But, although anyone has the right to dislike another individual, it’s totally irrational, patently insane to condemn an entire race—to despise an entire nation—to vilify an entire religion. Sooner or later, we must learn to judge each other on our own merits. Sooner or later, if man is ever to be worthy of his destiny, we must fill out hearts with tolerance. For then, and only then, will we be truly worthy of the concept that man was created in the image of God–a God who calls us ALL—His children.

Pax et Justitia.
Stan

This is the best show I’ve seen this year. I don’t think I’ve been this effusive about a show since Severance. Lots of food metaphors to describe this magnificent show, and I won’t attempt one, but I haven’t

There are scenes that are not for the anxious. There’s the best monologue I’ve seen in a while, the best long take I’ve seen in a while, the most chemistry between the cast I’ve seen in a while.

Be a Kermit the Frog. Have a creative vision and no ego. Recognize the unique talents of those around you. Attract weirdos. Manage chaos. Show kindness. Be sincere.

I don’t think he was a bad guy.

I mean, other than the fact he’s a lying, unqualified, draft dodging, gold star family disrespecting, POW attacking, US General insulting, racist, sexist, vulgar, confirmed sexual assaulting, trillion dollars to the rich tax cutting, own daughter creeping¹, wife cheating with a pornstar after birth of son and paying her off to influence a presidential election, $413 million dollar inheritance getting, teen pageant dressing room invading, baby and mother separating, breast feeding mother shaming, fat-shaming while being fat, 17 women accusing him of sexual assaulting, accusers are not attractive enough for him to assault implying, university student defrauding, bankrupt casino causing, kids cancer charity stealing, taped detailed accusation of rape of a minor having, wife-beating, popular vote losing, anti-vaxxing, Christianity-faking, publicist impersonating, tax dodging, friends’ wives pursuing, foreign aid bribing, 1/3 of the presidency golf playing, free press assaulting, disabled reporter mocking, Hannity coordinating, Cambridge Analytica using, Ivanka is a “piece of ass” approving, loan application asset inflating, historically low polling, college achievement faking, unqualified judge appointing, unqualified cabinet member appointing, foreign influence on our election welcoming, tax release avoiding, birther conspiracy spreading, Ukraine ambassador targeting, Russian money taking, Kurdish ally abandoning, soldier brain injury downplaying, full morning “executive time” taking, Epstein befriending, Putin bowing, Kim Jong Un praising, North Korean general saluting, US intelligence denying, tallest building in lower Manhattan after 9/11 boasting, congress obstructing, nuclear non-proliferation deal ending, Justice obstructing, unqualified daughter and son-in-law appointing, healthcare cut targeting, pedophile candidate supporting, trump tower Moscow denying, mail-bomber inspiring, 4 out of top 5 largest protests in US history causing, green energy stifling, clean water regulation destroying, healthy school lunch ending, climate change denying, congressional and judicial branch attacking, economy does better under democrats saying, Goldman Sachs appointing, food stamp removing, emissions standards lowering, press conference avoiding, emoluments clause breaking, longest govt shutdown record holding, Saudi Arabia nuclear tech selling, golf cheating, time magazine cover faking, El Paso mass shooter inspiring, paying legal bills for roughing up protestors promising, killed soldier “knew what he signed up for” saying, weather map modifying, pardon abusing, COVID response mishandling, twice impeached, insurrection inciting, burying his ex-wife on his golf course, classified document absconding scumbag…

Jenna Ellis, the third pillar of the Elite Strike Force, who pled guilty in the Georgia election interference case:

“I know him (Trump) well as a friend, as a former boss, I have great love and respect for him personally. I simply can’t support him for elected office again. Why I have chosen to distance is because of that, frankly, malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong. And the total idolatry that I’m seeing from some of the supporters that are unwilling to put the Constitution and the country and the conservative principles above their love for a star is really troubling. And I think that we do need to, as Americans and as conservatives and particularly as Christians, take this very seriously and understand where are we putting our vote.”

You gotta feel bad for this poor thing.

Poor Jenna Ellis. Went from traffic lawyer to being farted on by Rudy Giuliani then on to MAGA darling only to be indicted facing 5 years minimum. I’d pour one out for her but I’m too busy drinking it all down.

Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men* as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Here are two meditations in the form of Jordan Klepper’s excellent interactions with the deluded. I just wish that every supporter were as candid as the woman Jordan spoke to in this first one (starting 00:40) without resorting to shameless and awkward sophistry and whataboutism.

This is a fucking clown.

The most pathetic position, however, is one where you will readily admit to all of your Orange Leader’s “cruelties, collusions, corruptions, and crimes” but sigh and support the thrice-indicted buffoon’s second go at authoritarianism (with or without issuing a weak “both sides”). Consider this solemn Solomon from my home state:

It’s either malice or delusion. Either way, the Truth does not matter when they’re hurting the right people. Prompting this response from a professor of medicine at DMU.

From the United Automobile Worker magazine, 1937:

“What did you tell that man just now?”
“I told him to hurry.”
“What right do you have to tell him to hurry?”
“I pay him to hurry.”
“How much do you pay him?”
“Four dollars a day.”
“Where do you get the money?”
“I sell products.”
“Who makes the products?”
“He does.”
“How many products does he make in a day?”
“Ten dollars worth.”
“Then, instead of you paying him, he pays you $6 a day to stand around and tell him to hurry.”
“Well, but I own the machines.”
“How did you get the machines?”
“Sold products and bought them.”
“Who made the products?”
“Shut up. He might hear you.”

I am not sure how lost and/or rotten you have to be at your core to weep over something that guarantees some basic fucking rights to two fellow human beings.

When you constantly remind people of your religious persuasions, you are an advertisement for your faith.

This also reminds me of the terribly typical ploy of the oppressor of making themselves out to be victims as they deny rights to the real ones.

You’re just gonna have to learn to coexist with all of us. And I’m sure it’s not that hard.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Miller claims that he has ‘problems’ with his Orange Overlord. This was filmed in 2018 and there were many, many ‘problems’ with the administration he must have been aware of. The only filthiness he addresses is his non-chalant and charitable admission that separating children from their families might be wrong¹. Everything else is lazy pabulum for the most ardent of Combover Caligula’s fans. The cruelty is the point, etc.

But what Miller loves more than his fondness for his Orange Daddy’s ‘outer voice being the same as his inner voice’² is the fact that the fuckhead really winds up liberals. That’s it. There is no more nuance here. The sadistic glee of watching reasonable people lose their minds over a wannabe authoritarian and his sycophants fucking over Constitutional, democratic ideals and hurting immigrants and the marginalized is good American, Christian fun!

Was looking for some paintings I could send as Diwali greetings and came by these lovely pieces.

This one’s from Google Arts & Culture and shows a princess with her consorts.

For those asking from around the world how Britain has gotten into this mess:

• The Conservative Party has always been obsessed with Europe
• This caused divides making the party hard to manage
• Back in 2015 then Prime Minister David Cameron had an idea
• He promised a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU if he won the election
• He won the election
• The referendum was held; 52% of people voted to leave the EU
• David Cameron resigned
• Theresa May became Prime Minister saying that “Brexit means Brexit”
• It turned out that nobody actually knew what Brexit meant
• She called an election and lost the majority
• She couldn’t get the Conservative party to agree on a Brexit deal so she quit
• Boris Johnson became Prime Minister promising to “Get Brexit done”
• He called a general election and won a majority
• The UK left the European Union in January 2020
• Major Brexit issues remain unresolved and it has negatively impacted the UK economy
• Boris Johnson was forced to resign in disgrace in July 2022 following a series of scandals
• Liz Truss was selected to replace Boris Johnson by members of the Conservative Party
• She announced a raft of unfunded tax cuts to “grow the economy”
• The economy collapsed
• She sacked her chancellor
• She resigned

Fin.

The reason republicans get so incredibly huffy when any of the tools of law enforcement are ever turned upon them is they think “criminals” as an inherent class of people (who they of course could never be part of) rather than a descriptor for someone who commits illegal acts.

Not too far-fetched an observation. Consider the following:

please bro just one more election please just one more I swear we just gotta win one more please bro please after the election we’ll fix everything please come on bro this is the most important election in history bro please bro I gotta win this one please bro please

McMaster: called him a dope with the intelligence of a kindergartner

Mattis: called him a 5th grader.

Mnuchin: called him an idiot.

Graham: called him a complete idiot.

Priebus: called him an idiot.

John Kelly: called him a f***ing idiot.

Tillerson: called him a f***ing moron.

Cohn: called him dumb as sh*t.

McRaven: called him the biggest threat to our democracy.

Bannon: called him a f***ing moron.

John Dowd: called him a f****ing liar and too dumb to testify.

Rupert Murdoch: called him a f***ing idiot.

John Bolton: “Trump has the attention span of a fruit fly.”

William T. Kelley: (Professor at Penn) called him the dumbest goddamn student he ever had.

Fran Lebowitz (author): “Everyone says he is crazy – which maybe he is – but the scarier thing about him is that he is stupid. You do not know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don’t.”

Tony Schwartz: (the ghostwriter of “The Art of the Deal”) called him a man with a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance.

John Kelly: “He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.”

Anonymous GOP Congressman in a Safeway Rant: called him an evil, really f***ing stupid Forrest Gump.

Mueller: called him Individual 1

And the rest of the world just laughs at him.

That would be a Swiss gun instructor. His country has 2.3 million guns per 8.6 million people and has had exactly one mass shooting since 2001.

They are able to do this despite being one of the most armed European countries because they have commonsense gun laws, actually fucking act to prevent senseless tragedy, and do not fetishize or worship their guns or the hallowed, immutable, “God-given” Second Amendment.

There was yet another mass shooting in America, this time in Ames, Iowa, a collegetown I lived in for many years. Three innocent people died. More thoughts and prayers by our effete, corrupt leaders until the next horrifying and avoidable tragedy. Nothing will change.

by Matt Davies

• 101st Chairborne
• 1st Methanized Infantile Division
• Al-Kabob
• Army National Lard
• Battle of The Bulging Stomach
• Bozo Haram
• Branch Covidians
• Buffet Brigade
• Bundesmeal
• Call of Foodie
• Chowed Boys
• Cosplaytriots
• Country Bombkins
• Coup Klutz Clan
• CroMAGAnons
• Cult 45
• Delta Farce
• Delta Forks
• Fryatollahs
• G.I. Jokes
• G.I. Jugs
• Ghost bacon
• GI Jugs
• GI Sloppy Joe
• Gravy Seals
• Green Beignets
• Green Buffets
• Griller Warfare
• Hamburger Harkonnen
• Hez-bubba
• Hezba-la-mode
• Hogan’s Zeroes
• Insulin Insurgents
• Insulin Resistance
• Irrational Guar
• Kommando Soup Kräfte
• Kool-Aid Brigade
• Luftwaffle
• MAGAhideen
• Mayonnaise Militia
• Meal Team Six
• MephamphetaMarines
• Mid-life ISIS
• National Lard
• Natty ISIS
• Oaf Creepers
• Operation Dessert Storm
• Prone Boys
• Q Cucks Klan
• Seal Team Snacks
• Semper Fries
• Semper Fudge
• Shock & Olive Garden
• Slaw and Order
• Snack Ops
• Special Courses
• Special Farces
• Special Portions
• Special Weapons And Toppings
• Sporktroopers
• Stormscooters
• Supper Fidelis
• TactiTools
• Taking up Space Force
• Tali-Born Again
• Talibangelicals
• Talibanjos
• Talibubba
• The Califat
• The Double Chinfantry
• The Eatstern Front
• The Expandables
• The Mandalardians
• The Queens Lard
• The Secret Circus
• Traitor Tots
• Traitor Trash
• Traitortots
• Trumpanzees
• U.S Marshmallows
• Vanilla Isis
• Vietnom-nom-nom Veterans
• Wal-Martyrs
• Well-fedayeen
• Whiskey tango food truck
• Wide Supremacist
• Yeehawwdists
• Yokel Haram
• Y’all Qaeda
• Y’alliban

Someone called this Ben Stiller’s greatest work since the gas station scene. A higher compliment is impossible.

This is simply excellent stuff top-to-bottom, end-to-end: opening titles, typography, set design, background score, cinematography, story, commentary on our work selves, commentary on our inner and kinder and suffering ‘spiritual’ selves which we’ve thrust into a mad world, acting, pacing, directing.

Behold the story of a Master Strategist, a 5D-Chess playing Svengali absorbed in his craft 🙏🔥

If you write one, I will not read it.

More people like this, and on both sides, please.

Senator Grassley is 88 years old. He voted to oppose Judge Jackson’s nomination.

“Having carefully studied her record, unfortunately I think she and I have fundamentally different views on the role of judges and the role that they should play in our system of government because of those disagreements I can’t support her nomination,” Grassley said.

Via JK.

Brilliant. Take a bow, Late Show writers.

A Maya King who reigned from 682-734 CE. Here’s a portrait of him “with headdress and cloak of quetzal feathers”.

by Terry Rutledge

That’s a rendering of this portrait:

Via @archaeologyart who note that “Knowledge of quetzal ecology was required to obtain the feathers.⁣”

Khan Academy has a lot more information on the king and the stela.

I know painfully little about Maya history and must amend this somehow.

An Atlassian competitor, it packs “unfamiliar terms, new abstractions and an ‘original’ API” along with “poor test coverage and 500+ open bugs.” There’s more on that page and it’s all very delightful.

I really cannot describe how much I love this. Saved a screenshot here. I am on Winter break and am not looking forward to using Jira or Confluence when I get back to work. If I could make these kinds of decisions, I’d move our team to Fibery’s offerings blindly and posthaste for the simple reasons that, unlike Atlassian, they have a sense of humor and are aware of the difficulty of creating collaboration software that does not suck. Their stuff looks like it doesn’t suck tho.

Whip smart, very taut writing. Selena Gomez was perfect. Bromance and chemistry was 100%.

https://www.housebeautiful.com/design-inspiration/a37512728/the-arconia-hulu-only-murders-in-the-building-nyc-manhattan-apartment-building-the-belnord/

Only Murders in the Building is not just enjoyable for its genre-appropriate whimsy, its ability to keep viewers on the edge of their seats for 10 episodes, or for the parallels it draws between its characters and us as viewers. Similar to Knives Out, Only Murders in the Building works because it succeeds on all of these fronts simultaneously whilst giving viewers a cast of characters we can become deeply invested in. The show is not just about finding out who killed Tim Kono; it’s also about making sure Mabel’s happy, that Oliver can direct again, that Charles finds a love worthy of him. We are invested in the joy of these characters just as much as we are invested in the ways we, as mystery-loving audience members, mirror them at their best and worst.

https://film-cred.com/the-art-of-the-murder-mystery-and-only-murders-in-the-building/

Should be a lovely 2022 and 2024. By Jen Sorenson whose work I love.

Stellan Skarsgard, in a reader interview with The Guardian:

What is your take on the criticism of superhero movies by directors such as Martin Scorsese and Ridley Scott? HoggyBear

I’ve got nothing against superhero movies. I’ve been in a couple and they definitely have a place. The problem is that the system that allows eight people to own half of the wealth in the world enhances the power of the market forces, so small and independent cinemas rarely exist any more outside a few big cities. There’s no distribution channels for all the mid-budget films that have the best actors, the best writing, because they can’t throw up $3m for a marketing campaign. When cinemas let them in, they do so for one week and if it doesn’t pay off in a week, they’re gone.

Remember that The Godfather first opened in 100 cinemas in the United States – big films now open in 4,000. They had small ads in the New York Times, but it grew and grew because it was such a good film. The people’s opinion has no chance any more. And that is sad.

I think that we should have Marvel films and more rollercoaster films. We should have other films, too. And that’s the sad thing: when raw market forces come in, studios start being run by companies that don’t care if they’re dealing in films or toothpaste so long as they get their 10% [return]. When AT&T took over Time Warner, it immediately told HBO to become lighter and more commercial. They were always making money. But not enough for an investor.

@kenlowery comments:

“They were always making money, but not enough for an investor” is the skeleton key for the hollowing out of so much cultural landscape, not the internet or millennials or w/e. Retail stores, newspapers, radio, all of it - not profitable quickly enough for short-term gamblers

I first saw it in radio when the restrictions dropped and Clear Channel gobbled up every major FM station in town. Channels and formats that’d been stable for 30+ years would flip formats (and fire people by the dozens) three times in five years.

Everyone has their Cassandra hobbyhorses and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is one of mine

Calling them “short-term gamblers” is a misnomer tbh. Gamblers assume risk, and investors have completely offloaded the risk onto everyone else.

People join terrible communities as a way to make sense of the madness and manage pain.

• Create words for in and outgroups. With these words, reinforce the group’s ideology.
  • Assert that you are either X or you are not. There are no in-between. People aren’t complex and must be easily categorized. Your kind neighbour of 20 years who voted for Trump? Racist.
  • Only avowed members of the group know the ‘correct’ definitions of these words. Newcomers must know them and are not allowed to question them.
• Put a little gold in the chickenfeed: Actually help a few of your members. When you do, and if your help produces any positive outcome, make sure everyone knows about it.
• Maintain a careful list of must-consumes: authors, books, videos, movies, that support and demonstrate your group’s core values. This is your religion’s canon, your group’s doctrine. Accept no criticism; throw out members who question them.
• “If it isn’t working, you’re doing it wrong.” You are not praying enough. You are not engaging enough. You do not believe enough. You don’t hate enough.

References #

https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/rhj35f/cmv_female_dating_strategy_is_little_more_than_a/hos8jy0/

Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.

I think we’re doing pretty well here. Things will be fine in 2024. Peaceful, lawful, and full of dignity and decorum 🙏

I see I’ve been summoned. Your comments in this thread make it clear that nothing will change your position. It’s a difficult position to combat, because it’s in such a defiance of literally anything written on the topic in at least the last 50 years. You are not operating off the same foundations of evidence that others are, and for that reason I suspect they, like me, are not terribly interested in arguing. Because it’s unlikely your drivel will be removed, I’m posting some quotes and links for those who see this thread later and think you might have even begun to approach a point supported by any specialist on the topic. I do not intend these to be comprehensive; there are myriad examples of “deliberate attempts to destroy native culture in the Americas” in, well, literally any single book or article you can pick up about the era. Rather, because you’ve instead there never was any such thing, I’ve provided some obvious examples.

---

A primary goal of the Spanish colonial regime was to completely extirpate indigenous ways of life. While this was nominally about conversion to Catholicism, those in charge made it quite explicit that “conversion” not only should be but needed to be a violent process. Everything potentially conceivable as an indigenous practice, be it burial rituals, ways to build houses, or farming technologies, was targeted, To quote historian Peter Gose:

only by rebuilding Indian life from the ground up, educating, and preventing (with force if necessary) the return to idolatry could the missionary arrest these hereditary inclinations and modify them over time.

Francisco de Toledo, Viceroy of Peru, made clear in a 1570 decree that failure to comply with Catholicism was an offense punishable by death and within secular jurisdiction:

And should it occur that an infidel dogmatizer be found who disrupts the preaching of the gospel and manages to pervert the newly converted, in this case secular judges can proceed against such infidel dogmatizers, punishing them with death or other punishments that seem appropriate to them, since it is declared by congresses of theologians and jurists that His Majesty has convened in the Kingdoms of Spain that not only is this just cause for condemning such people to death, but even for waging war against a whole kingdom or province with all the death and damage to property that results

The same Toledo decreed in 1580 that Catholic priests and secular judges and magistrates should work together to destroy indigenous burial sites:

I order and command that each magistrate ensure that in his district all the tower tombs be knocked down, and that a large pit be dug into which all of the bones of those who died as pagans be mixed together, and that special care be taken henceforth to gather the intelligence necessary to discover whether any of the baptized are buried outside of the church, with the priest and the judge helping each other in such an important matter

Not only was the destruction of native culture a top-down decree, resistance was explicitly a death sentence.

---

The contemporary diversity of Latin America is not the result of natural “intermixing,” but the failure of the Spanish to assert themselves and the continuous resistance of the indigenous population. As early as 1588, we see letters from local priests airing grievances about the failure of the reduccion towns they were supposed to relocate native families to:

‘the corregidores are obliged, and the governors, to reduce the towns and order them reduced, and to build churches, take care to find out if the people come diligently for religious instruction and mass, to make them come and help the priest, and punish the careless, lazy, and bad Indians in the works of Christianity, as the ordinances of don Francisco de Toledo require, [but] they do not comply. Rather, many of the towns have yet to be reduced, and many churches are yet to be built, and a large part of the Indians are fled to many places where they neither see a priest nor receive religious instruction.

Reduccion was not a voluntary process, nor was it a question of simply “moving away.” Not only did it involve the destruction of native religious sites, it frequently involved the destruction of entire towns to repurpose building material and ensure people could not return. In fact, where we do see more voluntary participation in Spanish colonial structures, usually because of the political legibility and opportunities it provided, the resulting syncretism becomes an ever greater source of anxiety for the Spanish. Indigenous elites could selectively participate in Catholicism and game the system to their benefit- not something the state wanted to admit could happen.

These quotes come from Gose’s chapter on reducciones uploaded here.

I will also provide this section from the conclusion of Nicholas Robins’ book Mercury, Mining, and Empire; the entirety is uploaded here. The quoted chunk below is a summary of the various historical events presented in that chapter.

The white legend held much historiographical sway throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, and in no small part reflected a selective focus on legal structures rather than their application, subsumed in a denigratory view of native peoples, their cultures, and their heritage. As later twentieth-century historians began to examine the actual operation of the colony, the black legend again gained ascendance. As Benjamin Keen wrote, the black legend is “no legend at all.

Twentieth-century concepts of genocide have superseded this debate, and the genocidal nature of the conquest is, ironically, evident in the very Spanish laws that the advocates of the white legend used in their efforts to justify their position. Such policies in Latin America had a defining influence on Rafael Lemkin, the scholar who first developed the term genocide in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. As developed by Lemkin, “Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor,” which often included the establishment of settler colonies. Because of the intimate links between culture and national identity, Lemkin equated intentional cultural destruction with genocide. It was in no small part a result of his tireless efforts that in 1948 the United Nations adopted the defintion of genocide which, despite its shortcomings, serves today as international law. The fact that genocide is a modern concept and that colonists operated within the “spirit of the times” in no way lessens the genocidal nature of their actions. It was, in fact, historical genocides, including those in Latin America, that informed Lemkin’s thinking and gave rise to the term.

Dehumanization of the victim is the handmaiden of genocide, and that which occurred in Spanish America is no exception. Although there were those who recognized the humanity of the natives and sought to defend them, they were in the end a small minority. The image of the Indian as a lazy, thieving, ignorant, prevaricating drunkard who only responded to force was, perversely, a step up from the ranks of nonhumans in which they were initially cast. The official recognition that the Indians were in fact human had little effect in their daily lives, as they were still treated like animals and viewed as natural servants by non-Indians. It is remarkable that the white legend could ever emerge from this genocidogenic milieu. With the path to genocide thus opened by the machete of dehumanization, Spanish policies to culturally destroy and otherwise subject the Amerindians as a people were multifaceted, consistent, and enduring. Those developed and implemented by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo in Peru in the 1570s have elevated him to the status of genocidier extraordinaire.

Once an Indian group had refused to submit to the Spanish crown, they could be legally enslaved, and calls for submission were usually made in a language the Indians did not understand and were often out of earshot. In some cases, the goal was the outright physical extermination or enslavement of specific ethnic groups whom the authorities could not control, such as the Chiriguano and Araucanian Indians. Another benefit from the crown’s perspective was that restive Spaniards and Creoles could be dispatched in such campaigns, thus relieving cities and towns of troublemakers while bringing new lands and labor into the kingdom. Ironically, de Toledo’s campaign to wipe out the Chiriguano contributed to his own ill health. Overall, however, genocidal policies in the Andes and the Americas centered on systematic cultural, religious, and linguistic destruction, forced labor, and forced relocation, much of which affected reproduction and the ability of individuals and communities to sustain themselves.

The forced relocation of Indians from usually spread-out settlements into reducciones, or Spanish-style communities, had among its primary objectives the abolition of indigenous religious and cultural practices and their replacement with those associated with Catholicism. As native lands and the surrounding geographical environment had tremendous spiritual significance, their physical removal also undermined indigenous spiritual relationships. Complementing the natives’ spiritual and cultural control was the physical control, and thus access to labor, offered by the new communities. The concentration of people also inadvertently fostered the spread of disease, giving added impetus to the demographic implosion. Finally, forced relocation was a direct attack on traditional means of sustenance, as many kin groups settled in and utilized the diverse microclimates of the region to provide a variety of foodstuffs and products for the group.

Integrated into this cultural onslaught were extirpation campaigns designed to seek out and destroy all indigenous religious shrines and icons and to either convert or kill native religious leaders. The damage matched the zeal and went to the heart of indigenous spiritual identity. For example, in 1559, an extirpation drive led by Augustinian friars resulted in the destruction of about 5,000 religious icons in the region of Huaylas, Peru, alone. Cultural destruction, or ethnocide, also occurred on a daily basis in Indian villages, where the natives were subject to forced baptism as well as physical and financial participation in a host of Catholic rites. As linchpins in the colonial apparatus, the clergy not only focused on spiritual conformity but also wielded formidable political and economic power in the community. Challenges to their authority were quickly met with the lash, imprisonment, exile, or the confiscation of property.

Miscegenation, often though not always through rape, also had profound personal, cultural, and genetic impacts on indigenous people. Part of the reason was the relative paucity of Spanish women in the colony, while power, opportunity, and impunity also played important roles. Genetic effacement was, in the 1770s, complemented by efforts to illegalize and eliminate native languages. A component in the wider effort to deculturate the indigenes, such policies were implemented with renewed vigor following the Great Rebellion of 1780–1782. Such laws contained provisions making it illegal to communicate with servants in anything but Spanish, and any servant who did not promptly learn the language was to be fired. The fact that there are still Indians in the Andes does not diminish the fact that they were victims of genocide, for few genocides are total.

Lastly, I would direct readers to the following article: Levene, Mark. 1999. “The Chittagong Hill Tracts: A Case Study in the Political Economy of ‘Creeping’ Genocide.” Third World Quarterly 20 (2): 339–69.

Though it talks about events a world away, it’s discussion of genocide is pertinent here. From the abstract:

The destruction of indigenous, tribal peoples in remote and/or frontier regions of the developing world is often assumed to be the outcome of inexorable, even inevitable forces of progress. People are not so much killed, they become extinct. Terms such as ethnocide, cultural genocide or developmental genocide suggest a distinct form of ‘off the map’ elimination which implicitly discourages comparison with other acknowledged examples of genocide. By concentrating on a little-known case study, that of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) in Bangladesh, this article argues that this sort of categorisation is misplaced. Not only is the destruction or attempted destruction of fourth world peoples central to the pattern of contemporary genocide but, by examining such specific examples, we can more clearly delineate the phenomenon’s more general wellsprings and processes. The example of the CHT does have its own peculiar features; not least what has been termed here its ‘creeping’ nature. In other respects, however, the efforts of a new nation-state to overcome its structural weaknesses by attempting a forced-pace consolidation and settlement of its one, allegedly, unoccupied resource-rich frontier region closely mirrors other state-building, developmental agendas which have been confronted with communal resistance. The ensuing crisis of state–communal relations, however, cannot be viewed in national isolation. Bangladesh’s drive to develop the CHT has not only been funded by Western finance and aid but is closely linked to its efforts to integrate itself rapidly into a Western dominated and regulated international system. It is in these efforts ‘to realise what is actually unrealisable’ that the relationship between a flawed state power and genocide can be located.

Genocide need not be a state program uniquely articulated to eliminate a people or their culture. Rather, it is often disguised in the name “progress” or “development.” This connects to the Spanish colonial economic system, based on what Robins (above) calls the “ultra-violence” of forced labor in mines.

The sentiment inside The Orange Sphere of Shit, by this genius (who is treating himself with Ivermectin.)

QL made some observations:

1. This is an incomplete pass.
2. It’s probably unsportsmanlike conduct penalty
3. It’s at least intentional grounding.
4. It does no good, only hurts the rest of the team.
5. The vaxxed player would be wearing a cup (you know, because they’re actually protected).
6. What makes it “accurate” is that the whole point is to hurt another person.

That’ll show 'em.

Eighth Wonder of the World indeed. Here’s a nice calculator that draws graphs, and allows for monthly contributions and rate variances.

Forgot to add this to my Collection of Shitkraken.

Two lawyers who currently work for Trump or in the former president’s inner orbit say they want absolutely nothing to do with her and have cautioned others in MAGAland to do the same. One said they’d recently deleted her phone number.

Two other people familiar with the matter said that ever since he left office in January, certain advisers and longtime associates to Trump have kept an informal shortlist of people who they should look out for, including at Trump’s private clubs or offices in Florida, New Jersey, and New York. The point of this roster is to intercept and possibly rebuff attempted outreach, visits, or phone calls from a handful of conservative figures who could bring the ex-president more undesired headaches.

“Sidney is very much on the no-go list,” one of the knowledgeable sources said. “Her problems right now do not need to be the [former] president’s problems.”

Powell’s legal exposure right now is, of course, massive. And ever since she tried to work with Trump to orchestrate a coup last year against Joe Biden, feelings of frustration and bitterness have lingered between Trump and Powell. According to a source with direct knowledge of the matter, since December Powell has privately talked about how disappointed she was in Trump because he didn’t end up appointing her to a “special” role in his White House where she would have probed “election fraud” conspiracy theories during the final days of his term.

“She sounded pretty broken up about it,” this person noted. “I felt sorry for her.”

Meanwhile, the Brave Leader of the Elite Strike-Force Team feels bad about his own ban from State Television.

Old stuff, but always immensely satisfying to read ♥️

He was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms - one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the thought police, the stability of the Party depended.

COVID #

Putin and Russia #

“Over the two-year period from 2014 to 2016, the net favorability of Republicans toward Putin increased by 56 points. Data are from the YouGov/Economist poll, 10-13 December 2016; graphs are by Will Jordan.” (Source)

---

Support for Syrian Air Strikes #

Source

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Christianity and Morals #

Conservative Christians (evangelicals in particular) found a new, higher tolerance for immoral conduct in their elected leaders in 2016, after Trump became the nominee.

Compared to 2011, Americans today are more likely to say elected officials can still perform their public duties in an ethical manner even if they have committed immoral personal acts. More than six in ten (61%) Americans say immoral personal behavior does not preclude public officials from carrying out their public or professional duties with honesty and integrity; only 29 percent of the public disagree.

[…] No group has shifted their position more dramatically than white evangelical Protestants. More than seven in ten (72%) white evangelical Protestants say an elected official can behave ethically even if they have committed transgressions in their personal life—a 42-point jump from 2011, when only 30 % of white evangelical Protestants said the same.

---

Education #

10% fewer Republicans believed the wealthy weren’t paying enough in taxes once a billionaire became their president. Democrats remain fairly consistent. Source Data and Article for Context

Wisconsin Republicans felt the economy improve by 85 approval points the day Trump was sworn in. Source Data and Article for Context

Republicans started to think college education is a bad thing once Trump entered the primary. Democrats remain consistent. Data: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/07/20/republicans-skeptical-of-colleges-impact-on-u-s-but-most-see-benefits-for-workforce-preparation/

https://np.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/787fdh/after_gold_star_widow_breaks_silence_trump/dornc4n/

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Senate Vote for Net Neutrality

House Vote for Net Neutrality

#Money in Elections and Voting

Campaign Finance Disclosure Requirements

DISCLOSE Act

Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act

(Reverse Citizens United) Sets reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by electoral candidates to influence elections

#Environment

Stop “the War on Coal” Act of 2012

EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act of 2013

Prohibit the Social Cost of Carbon in Agency Determinations

#Family Planning

Teen Pregnancy Education Amendment

Family Planning and Teen Pregnancy Prevention

Protect Women’s Health From Corporate Interference Act The ‘anti-Hobby Lobby’ bill.

#Civil Rights

Same Sex Marriage Resolution 2006

Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2013

Exempts Religiously Affiliated Employers from the Prohibition on Employment Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

#“War on Terror”

Time Between Troop Deployments

Habeas Corpus for Detainees of the United States

Habeas Review Amendment

Prohibits Detention of U.S. Citizens Without Trial

Authorizes Further Detention After Trial During Wartime

Repeal Indefinite Military Detention

House Vote to Close the Guantanamo Prison

Senate Vote to Close the Guantanamo Prison

Prohibits the Use of Funds for the Transfer or Release of Individuals Detained at Guantanamo

Oversight of CIA Interrogation and Detention

#Misc

Prohibit the Use of Funds to Carry Out the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

Allow employers to penalize employees that don’t submit genetic testing for health insurance (Committee vote)

https://np.reddit.com/r/news/comments/6brytw/justice_department_appoints_special_prosecutor/dhp6bkr

Trump fans are much angrier about housing assistance when they see an image of a black man

In contrast, Clinton supporters seemed relatively unmoved by racial cues.

#Far-right groups are responsible for 12 times as many fatalities, 36 times as many injuries as far-left groups

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/politics/trump-alt-left-fact-check.html

---

#Money in Elections and Voting

Campaign Finance Disclosure Requirements

DISCLOSE Act

Backup Paper Ballots - Voting Record

Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act

Reverse Citizens United

#“War on Terror”

Time Between Troop Deployments

Habeas Corpus for Detainees of the United States

Habeas Review Amendment

Prohibits Detention of U.S. Citizens Without Trial

Authorizes Further Detention After Trial During Wartime

Prohibits Prosecution of Enemy Combatants in Civilian Courts

Repeal Indefinite Military Detention

Oversight of CIA Interrogation and Detention Amendment

Patriot Act Reauthorization

FISA Act Reauthorization of 2008

FISA Reauthorization of 2012

House Vote to Close the Guantanamo Prison

Senate Vote to Close the Guantanamo Prison

Prohibits the Use of Funds for the Transfer or Release of Individuals Detained at Guantanamo

Oversight of CIA Interrogation and Detention

#Civil Rights

Same Sex Marriage Resolution 2006

Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2013

Exempts Religiously Affiliated Employers from the Prohibition on Employment Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

#Family Planning

Teen Pregnancy Education Amendment

Family Planning and Teen Pregnancy Prevention

Protect Women’s Health From Corporate Interference Act

#The Economy/Jobs

Limits Interest Rates for Certain Federal Student Loans

Student Loan Affordability Act

Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Funding Amendment

End the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection

Kill Credit Default Swap Regulations

Revokes tax credits for businesses that move jobs overseas

Disapproval of President’s Authority to Raise the Debt Limit

Disapproval of President’s Authority to Raise the Debt Limit

Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act

Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act

Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Bureau Act

American Jobs Act of 2011 - $50 billion for infrastructure projects

Emergency Unemployment Compensation Extension

Reduces Funding for Food Stamps

Minimum Wage Fairness Act

Paycheck Fairness Act

Repeal Dodd Frank

Environment #

Stop “the War on Coal” Act of 2012

EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act of 2013

Prohibit the Social Cost of Carbon in Agency Determinations

Misc #

Prohibit the Use of Funds to Carry Out the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

Prohibiting Federal Funding of National Public Radio

Allow employers to penalize employees that don’t submit genetic testing for health insurance (Committee vote)

House Vote for Net Neutrality

Senate Vote for Net Neutrality

House Vote to Repeal Affordable Care Act

Senate Vote to Repeal Affordable Care Act

South Park Republican: “Both sides are the same.”

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/05/1059828993/data-vaccine-misinformation-trump-counties-covid-death-rate

https://twitter.com/MEPFuller/status/901871687532208128

The Party of Principles: #

• Exhibit 1: Opinion of Syrian airstrikes under Obama vs. Trump.
  Source Data 1, Source Data 2 and Article for Context

• Exhibit 2: /misc/2.pngb/both-sides/e-Opinion of the NFL after large amounts of players began kneeling during the anthem to protest racism. Article for Context (viewing source data requires purchasing Morning Consult package)

• Exhibit 3: Opinion of ESPN after they fired a conservative broadcast analyst. Article for Context (viewing source data requires purchasing YouGov’s “BrandIndex” package)

• Exhibit 4: Opinion of Vladimir Putin after Trump began praising Russia during the election. Source Data and Article for Context

• Exhibit 5: Opinion of “Obamacare” vs. “Kynect” (Kentucky’s implementation of Obamacare). Kentuckians feel differently about the policy depending on the name. Source Data and Article for Context

• Exhibit 6: Christians (particularly evangelicals) became monumentally more tolerant of private immoral conduct among politicians once Trump became the GOP nominee. Source Data and Article for Context

• Exhibit 7: White Evangelicals cared less about how religious a candidate was once Trump became the GOP nominee. (Same source and article as previous exhibit.)

• Exhibit 8: Republicans were far more likely to embrace a certain policy if they knew Trump was for it—whether the policy was liberal or conservative. Source Data and Article for Context

• Exhibit 9: Republicans became far more opposed to gun control when Obama took office. Democrats have remained consistent. Source Data and Article for Context

• Exhibit 10: Republicans started to think college education is a bad thing once Trump entered the primary. Democrats remain consistent. Source Data and Article for Context

• Exhibit 11: Wisconsin Republicans felt the economy improve by 85 approval points the day Trump was sworn in. Graph also shows some Democratic bias, but not nearly as bad. Source Data and Article for Context

• Exhibit 12: Republicans became deeply negative about trade agreements when Trump became the GOP frontrunner. Democrats remain consistent. Source Data and Article for Context

• Exhibit 13: 10% fewer Republicans believed the wealthy weren’t paying enough in taxes once a billionaire became their president. Democrats remain fairly consistent. Source Data and Article for Context

• Exhibit 14: Republicans suddenly feel very comfortable making major purchases now that Trump is president. Democrats don’t feel more or less comfortable than before. Article for Context (viewing source data requires purchasing Gallup’s Advanced Analytics package)

• Exhibit 15: Democrats have had a consistently improving outlook on the economy, including after Trump’s victory. Republicans? A 30-point spike once Trump won. Source Data and Article for Context

Donald Trump could go on a stage and start shouting about raising the minimum wage, increasing taxes on the wealthy, allowing more immigrants into the country, and combating climate change. His supporters would cheer and shout, and would all suddenly support liberal policies. It’s not a party of principles–it’s a party of sheep. And the data suggest that “both sides” aren’t the same in this regard. It’s just Republicans.

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https://www.prri.org/research/prri-brookings-oct-19-poll-politics-election-clinton-double-digit-lead-trump/

https://desdemonadespair.net/2016/12/graph-of-day-net-favorability-of.html
https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2016/04/27/yougov-economist-poll-april-22-26-2016
https://twitter.com/williamjordann/status/809069737879674888?lang=en
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CzpklkoWEAA8J5o?format=jpg&name=small
https://twitter.com/williamjordann/status/774230137097379840?lang=en
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/04/gop-voters-love-same-attack-on-syria-they-hated-under-obama.html

https://np.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/787fdh/after_gold_star_widow_breaks_silence_trump/dornc4n/

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Copying someone else’s post (original here):

Edit: More here and here.

• Under President Obama, job growth has been quite strong, and the unemployment rate has improved dramatically. PPP, however, found that 67% of Trump voters believe the unemployment rate went up under Obama - which is the exact opposite of reality.

• According to a poll published by The Washington Post, 52 percent of Republicans said they would back a postponement of the next election if Trump called for it.

• In July 2014, 66% of Republicans opined that Vladimir Putin was “somewhat or very unfavorable”. In December 2016, just 10% of Republicans felt the same way.

• As of late March 2017, 38% of Republicans viewed Russia as an ally or “friendly” to the U.S. Less than two months later, 49% of Republicans held the same view.

• Net favorability of Wikileaks among Republicans in June 2013 was -47%. By December 2016, it had increased to +27%.

• In 2016, over 75% of Republicans agreed that criticism from news organizations keeps politicians from doing inappropriate things. That number was down to 42% in March 2017.

• In 2009, just 31 percent of Republicans said free trade was a bad thing, that was up to 61 percent in an August poll.

• When NAFTA passed, it bears noting, it had the support of more than 75 percent of Republicans in both the House and the Senate. Now, only about a quarter of Republican voters say it’s a good thing.

• When Obama wanted to bomb Syria, only 22% of Republicans approved. Now 88% approve of Trump bombing Syria. (Democrats changed from 37% to 38%).

• The income tax has not changed under Trump. Yet, Republicans went from it being 39% fair to 56% fair.
  31% of Republicans agreed with the statement “The current economic situation in our country is good” in 2016. In 2017, 61% of Republicans agreed. The yearly GDP growth has remained virtually unchanged.

• In 2015, 27% of Republicans had a favorable opinion of the CIA. In 2016, only 4% of Republicans viewed the CIA favorably.

• In mid-April 2017, 31% of Republicans agreed that Trump should fire James Comey. James Comey was fired on May 9th. By May 11th, that number had shot up to 62%.

• As of mid-July 2017, less than 15% of Trump voters claimed to view the NFL “somewhat or very unfavorably”. By October, that number was over 60%.

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trump-his-supporters-and-the-persistence-the-reality-gap

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/346000-poll-about-half-of-republicans-would-back-postponing-2020-election-if-trump

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/02/28/our-donald-trump-inspired-tribalism-in-3-remarkable-charts/

https://egbertowillies.com/2017/04/23/bill-maher-uses-poll-force-conservative-concede-gop-base-tribal-facts-dont-matter-video/

https://imgur.com/a/CuPT9

• The Pentagon is apparently attempting to dissolve “Stars and Stripes,” a popular military newspaper that has been published using taxpayer dollars since the Civil War. The House is working to counteract the memo and associated budgetary change that would shutter the paper, but the Senate has not yet taken action. September, 2020. USA Today
• The president reportedly called John McCain and George H. W. Bush “losers” when addressing his staff due to McCain being a POW and Bush getting shot down during WWII. Additionally, sources claim he was absent from a ceremony in a French military cemetery in 2018 because “he did not believe it important to honor American war dead,” and separately referred to 1800 Marine war casualties as “suckers” for getting killed. Reported September, 2020. The Atlantic
• After staffing the VA with campaign doners, VA officials removed the 48-hour review of changes to veterans’ claims which veterans’ groups and 42 Attorneys General argue is critical to ensuring accuracy of the claims process. July, 2020. Stripes
• Trump promised to veto Defense Spending Bill, suspending military pay, if Congress introduces amendment to change names of military bases. The amendment passed both houses of Congress intact. July, 2020. Reuters
• Intelligence was incorporated into the PDB around March 2020 that Russia paid bounties to kill American troops. Since then, Trump has petitioned world leaders to bring Russia back into the G8, and has dismissed the intelligence reports as non-credible. June, 2020. Reuters
• The White House attempted to end National Guard deployments one day before they could claim benefits. May, 2020. Politico The deployments were extended after the story broke, but it’s unclear if it was because of the story, since some of those deployments were later extended again. The Hill
• The Trump adminstration seized 5 million masks intended for VA hospitals. April, 2020. Huffpost Jared Kushner allegedly created a middleman between government agencies and the National Stockpile by distributing equipment to private companies for a fee, and contacting those companies to sell the equipment to various agencies, states, and localities. Politico
• Brett Crozier, the captain of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, was relieved of command by the acting Secretary of the Navy after warning superiors that a COVID19 outbreak would likely sideline the aircraft carrier. The virus subsequently spread amongst the crew. March, 2020. USNI Timeline Historically, COs have been relieved of command by the Commodore of their squadron, the Chief of Naval Personnel, or the Chief of Naval Operations. This relief was conducted by the Secretary, who is appointed by the President, meaning it is highly likely that the President had a hand in making the decision. Business Insider
• The Trump adminstration suddenly removed 9,500 servicemembers from Germany, purportedly without consulting the German Foreign Ministry or NATO. March, 2020 Reuters
• After Iran’s retaliatory strike, 109 US troops suffered brain injuries. Trump dismissed these as “headaches.” February, 2020. Reuters
• Trump has pardoned multiple war criminals, despite recommendations from military officials. He also intervened often on the Eddie Gallagher case, getting him removed from solitary confinement, stopping an internal community review that would have stripped Gallagher of his warfare device, demanding on Twitter that he not lose rank, and firing then SecNav Richard Spencer when Spencer pushed back. November, 2019. AP Gallagher Timeline Spencer WashPo OpEd Politico
• Trump removed Lt. Col. Vindman and his brother from their positions in the White House when Vindman agreed to testify as part of the Ukraine debacle. Trump also criticized Vindman for asserting his rank and wearing his uniform while giving testimony. Vindman’s promotion to O-6 was reportedly contested by the President, and Vindman opted to retire shortly thereafter. November, 2019, June, 2020. Reuters Military Times
• Trump abruptly withdrew support from America’s allies in Syria after a phone call with Turkey’s president. October, 2019. Reuters
• The Trump administration sent American troops to defend the oil assets of the country that perpetrated 9/11. September, 2019. Reuters
• Trump tweeted a photo of an Iranian launch site from a potentially classified source. August, 2019. NPR
• Trump illegally diverted approved funding for schools on military bases, military housing, and daycare facilities to help pay for the border wall. August, 2019. NPR $3.6B, 2019 NPR, $3.8B, 2020
• Trump appointed three of his Mar-a-Lago pals to run the VA. They were later accused of “meddling” by other VA staff. August, 2019. Huffpost
• Veterans graves may be displaced due to border wall construction. August, 2019. Video from local NBC affiliate
• Trump ordered the Navy rescind medals given to Eddie Gallagher’s prosecution team. July, 2019. Reuters
• Trump sent troops to the border to assist with logistics, provide security, and paint the fence for a better “aesthetic appearance.” June, 2019. Military Times
• Trump made his 2nd wife, Marla Maples, sign a prenup that would have cut off all child support if Tiffany joined the military, got a full time job, or joined the Peace Corps. Reported June, 2019. Vanity Fair
• Trump turned away US servicemembers from his Memorial Day speech because they were from the destroyer USS John S. McCain. May, 2019. Business Insider
• White House staffers reportedly discussed moving or covering the USS John McCain during the president’s visit to Japan. A later report explains that the ship’s name was covered by a tarp for topside preservation, but the tarp was removed while the president was still in Japan. May, 2019. Navy Times
• The Trump adminstration purged 200,000 healthcare applications submitted to the VA. Reported May, 2019. Military.com Blog
• The Trump adminstration deported the spouse of a soldier who was killed in Afghanistan, leaving their daughter an orphan. April, 2019. WashPo An immigration advocacy group suggests this issue may affect almost 12,000 military families. Military Times
• Trump complained that he wasn’t thanked for appearing at John McCain’s funeral. March, 2019. The Independent
• Trump appointees have increased privatization of the VA, leading to longer waits and higher taxpayer cost. Reported February, 2019. NPR
• Trump refused to approve the budget without funding for the border wall, causing a government shutdown, and forcing the Coast Guard to work without pay. A bill was proposed by a Republican to specifically fund the Coast Guard, but Chuck Schumer blocked it. January, 2019. Task and Purpose The Hill
• Trump banned service members from serving based on gender identity. January, 2019. Reuters
• When a man was caught swindling veterans’ pensions for high-interest “cash advances," Trump’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined him $1. This type of fine has been termed the “Mulvaney Discount.” January, 2019. The Intercept
• Trump called a retired general a ‘dog’ with a ‘big, dumb mouth.’ January, 2019. The Hill
• Trump didn’t visit troops overseas until 2 years after taking office. December, 2018 Military Times from October, 2018 CBS News
• Trump posted pictures with deployed members of a SEAL team during his visit, including their names and faces. December, 2018. Huffpost
• Trump told deployed troops that he had given them a 10% raise. He actually tried giving the military a raise that was lower than the standard living adjustment, which Congress rejected. He then told servicemembers his raise was larger than Obama’s. It wasn’t. December, 2018. Military Times Additionally, servicemembers entitlements for housing and food haven’t kept up with inflation during the Trump presidency, with a couple years of 0% increases. But it is important to remember this is actually the fault of Congress, Trump just hasn’t done anything about it, while actively claiming the military has never been paid better. BAH since 2015 BAS since 2013
• Trump tried to slash disability and unemployment benefits for veterans and eliminate the unemployability extrascheduler rating. This was removed from the budget proposal. December, 2018. Snopes
• Trump urged Florida to not count absentee votes, which would include votes cast by resident servicemembers stationed outside of Florida. November, 2018 Huffpost
• While in Europe commemorating the end of WWI, Trump decided not to attend the ceremony at a military cemetery due to the rain -* other world leaders went anyway. November, 2018. The Hill
• Trump activated a National Guard deployment to the southern border a few days before Thanksgiving to prevent an alleged caravan f immigrants from entering. The deployment is still active two years later, meaning the National Guard is still maintaining a presence there. November, 2018. Task and Purpose
• The Trump administration failed to plan the shift in benefits when the Forever GI Act was implemented, causing the VA to miss veteran benefits payments, including housing allowances. The bill was signed into law in August, 2017, and the VA was still struggling with adminstrative issues over a year later. November, 2018. NBC News
• The rejection rate for veterans requesting family deportation protections doubled under the Trump administration. July, 2018 Newsweek
• The Trump adminstration has rolled back the MAVNI program, which allows immigrants to enlist in exchange for citizenship. Reportedly, a number of active servicemembers were given uncharacterized discharges shortly after the program was suspended. Reported July, 2018. The Independent
• Trump sent commandos into an ambush in Niger due to a lack of intel, sent contractors to pick them up, resulting in a commando being left behind, tortured, and executed. Trump reportedly approved the mission because Bannon told him Obama didn’t have the guts to do it. October, 2017. DoD Investigation Reuters Timeline
• Trump told a room full of Generals, “You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.” July, 2017. Military Times
• Trump blocked a veteran group on Twitter. June, 2017. The Hill
• Trump claims he knows more about ISIS than American generals. October, 2016. CBS News
• Trump said veterans get PTSD because they aren’t strong. October, 2016. Snopes
• Trump accepted a Purple Heart from a fan at one of his rallies and said: “I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier.” August, 2016. Politico
• Trump mistreats Gold Star families (families of a servicemember killed while serving): Myeshia Johnson (gold star widow), Khan family (gold star parents). 2016. The Independent, Myeshia Johnson NPR, Kahn Family
• Trump sent funds raised from a veterans benefit to the Donald J. Trump Foundation instead of veterans charities. The foundation has since been disbanded as a result of fraud. 2016. NPR
• Trump said he has “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military” because he went to a military-style academy. 2015. Politico
• Trump said he doesn’t consider POWs heroes because they were caught. He said he prefers people who were not caught. July, 2015. Politico
• Trump said having unprotected sex was his own personal Vietnam. 1998. Video of Howard Stern interview
• For a decade, Trump sought to kick veterans off of Fifth Avenue because he found them unsightly nuisances outside of Trump Tower. 1991. Daily Beast
• Trump dodged the draft 5 times by having a doctor diagnose him with bone spurs Snopes
• No Trump in America has ever served in the military; this spans 5 generations, and every branch of the family tree. In fact, the reason his grandfather immigrated to America was to avoid military service. The Guardian

---

Via

• accused 3,000 military families for election fraud of voting after being deployed
• removed POW/MIA flag from White House
• says Americans who died in war are “losers” and “suckers”
• “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers” he said about a U.S. military cemetery
• called McCain “a fucking loser” when asked to lower flags to half staff
• called Pres. George H.W. Bush a loser for being shot down during WWII
• “That guy is smart. Why did he join the military?” Trump said of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
• asked his staff to not include wounded veterans because amputees make him uncomfortable
• “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” Trump said to Gen. John Kelly about dead veterans, while visiting Kelly’s son’s grave at Arlington
• Trump knew since Mar 2020 that Russia paid bounties to kill American troops. On July 29 Trump defended Russia arming the Taliban against the US saying the US once did the same thing
• May '20 ended National Guard deployments one day before they could claim benefits
• Trump admin seized 5mil masks intended for VA hospitals. Kushner distributes these masks to private entities for a fee, who then sells the masks to the government
• Trump fired the captain of the USS Theodore Roosevelt after he warned superiors that COVID19 was spreading among his crew
• After Iran’s strike, 109 US troops suffered brain injuries. Trump dismissed these as “headaches”
• On 7/20/2017 in room 2E924 of the Pentagon, Trump told a room full of Generals, “You’re a bunch of dopes and babies”
• Said 26,000 military sexual assaults were to be ‘expected’ bc America lets women serve
• Invited the Taliban to Camp David on the anniversary of 9/11
• Claimed that his military budget made up for his lack of military experience
• Said if a Humvee was hit by an IED, soldiers “go for a little ride upward & they come down.”
• Pardoned multiple war criminals which betrayed the men of the 1st Platoon who helped convict him for violating long standing military values, discipline, and command (May&Nov 2019)
• mocked Lt. Col. Vindman for his rank and uniform. He threatened said purple heart officer resulting in the Army providing him protection. The Admin sent opposition research to the Pentagon to derail his promotion
• Trump’s Chief of Staff worked—in secret—to deny comprehensive health coverage to Vietnam Vets who suffered from Agent Orange
• There is a facility in Tijuana for US veterans that Trump deported
• Russia took control of the main U.S. military facility in Syria abandoned on Trump’s orders. Russia now owns the airstrip we built
• 0/7/19, Trump abruptly withdrew from Syria after a phone call with Turkey’s president (Erdogan). Turkey subsequently bombed US Special Forces
• sent thousands of American troops to defend the oil assets of the country that perpetrated 9/11
• Sept 2019, he made an Air Force cargo crew stop in Scotland (where there’s no U.S. base) to refuel at a commercial airport (where it costs more), so they could stay overnight at a Trump property (which isn’t close to the airport). Trump’s golf courses are losing money so he’s forcing the military to pay for 5-star nights there.
• Sept 2019, Pentagon pulled funds for military schools, military housing funds, and daycare to pay for Trump’s border wall
• Aug, 2019, emails revealed that 3 of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago pals, running the VA, are rampant with meddling. None of them served in the military, have experience in the VA, nor underwent any approval process. Yet they directed operations without any oversight
• Vet graves will be “dug up” for the border wall, after Trump instructed aides to seize private property. Trump told officials he would pardon them if they illegally seizing property
• Children of deployed US troops no longer guaranteed citizenship (August 28, 2019)
• 8/2/19 Trump requisitioned military retirement funds for the border wall
• 7/31/19 Trump ordered the Navy rescind medals to prosecutors who prosecuted war criminals
• denied a U.S. Marine of 6 years entry into the United States for his citizenship interview (Reported 7/17/19)
• made the U.S. Navy Blue Angels violate ethics rules by having them fly at his July 4th political campaign event (July 4, 2019)
• demanded US military chiefs stand next to him at 4th of July parade (reported July 2, 2019)
• In June 2019, Trump sent troops to the border to paint the fence for a better “aesthetic appearance”
• used his D-Day interview at a cemetery commemorating fallen US soldiers to attack a Vietnam veteran (6/6/19)
• started his D-Day commemoration speech by attacking a private citizen (Bette Midlere) (2019)
• made his 2nd wife, Marla Maples, sign a prenup that would have cut off all child support if Tiffany joined the military (reported June 4th, 2019)
• 5/27/2019 Trump turned away US military from his Memorial Day speech bc they were from the destroyer USS John S. McCain
• ordered the USS John McCain out of sight during his visit to Japan (May 15, 2019). The ship’s name was subsequently covered. (5/27/2019)
• purged 200,000 vets’ healthcare applications (reported 5/13/19)
• deported a spouse of fallen Army soldier killed in Afghanistan, leaving their daughter parentless (April 16, 2019)
• 3/20/19 Trump complained that a deceased war hero didn’t thank him for his funeral
• Between 12/22/2018, and 1/25/2019 Trump refused to sign his party’s funding bill, which shut down the government, which made USCG service members rely on food pantries. However, his appointees got a $10k pay raise
• banned troops from serving based on gender identity (1/22/2019)
• denied female troops access to birth control to limit sexual activity (on-going. Published 1/18/19)
• tried to deport a marine vet who is a U.S.-born citizen (1/16/2019)
• When a man was caught swindling veterans pensions for high-interest “cash advances," Trump’s CFPB let him go for $1 (1/26/19)
• called a retired general a ‘dog’ with a ‘big, dumb mouth’ (1/1/19)
• increased privatization of the VA, leading to longer waits and higher taxpayer cost (2018)
• finally visited troops 2 years after taking office, but only after 154 vacation days at his properties (10/26/18)
• revealed a covert Seal Team 5 deployment, including names and faces, on Twitter during his visit to Iraq (Dec 26, 2018)
• lied to deployed troops that he gave them a 10% raise (12/26/2018). Tried giving a raise that was lower than the standard living adjustment. Congress told him that wasn’t going to work. After giving them the raise that Congress made him, he lied about it pretending that it was larger than Obama’s. It wasn’t
• fired service members living with HIV just before the 2018 holidays
• tried to slash disability and unemployment benefits for Veterans to $0 and eliminate the unemployability extrascheduler rating (12/17/2018)
• called troops on Thanksgiving and told them he’s most thankful for himself (Thanksgiving, 2018)
• urged Florida to not count deployed military votes (11/12/2018)
• canceled an Arlington Cemetery visit on Veterans Day due to light rain (11/12/2018)
• While in Europe commemorating the end of WWI, he didn’t attend the ceremony at a US cemetery due to the rain. Other world leaders went anyway (11/10/2018)
• sent troops on a phantom mission to the border and made them miss Thanksgiving with their families (Oct-Dec, 2018). He stopped using troops as a political prop after the election, but the troops remained in muddy camps on the border (11/7/2018)
• changed the GI Bill through his Forever GI Act causing the VA to miss benefits, including housing allowances. This caused many vets to run out of food and rent. (reported 10/7/18)
• doubled the rejection rate for veterans requesting family deportation protections (7/5/2018)
• deported active-duty spouses (11,800 military families face this problem as of April 2018)
• forgot a fallen soldier’s name (below) during a call to his pregnant widow, then attacked her the next day (Oct 23-24, 2017)
• “They knew what they signed up for.” re: dead troops (10/18/17)
• sent commandos into an ambush w/ lack of intel, and sent contractors to pick them up, resulting in a commando being left behind, tortured, and executed. He approved the mission bc Bannon told him Obama didn’t have the guts to do it. 10/4/17
• Doesn’t stand during retreat bugle, continues to talk. “What a nice sound that is. Are they playing that for you [Sean Hannity] or me?” 10/11/17
• blocked a veteran group on Twitter (June 2017)
• ordered the discharge of active-duty immigrant troops with good records (2017-present)
• deported veterans (2017-present)
• said he knows more about ISIS than American generals (Oct 2016)
• 10/4/16 Trump said vets get PTSD because they aren’t strong
• Trump accepted a Purple Heart from a fan at one of his rallies and said: “I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier.” (Aug 2, 2016)
• Trump attacks Gold Star families: Myeshia Johnson (gold star widow), Khan family (gold star parents) etc. (2016-present)
• In Jan 2016, Trump sent funds raised from a veterans benefit to the Donald J Trump Foundation (the foundation was subsequently ordered shut down)
• said he has “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military” because he went to a military-style academy (2015 biography)
• said he doesn’t consider POWs heroes because they were caught. He said he prefers people who weren’t caught (July 18, 2015)
• Trump said having unprotected sex was his own personal Vietnam (1998)
• For a decade, Trump sought to kick veterans off of Fifth Avenue because he found them unsightly nuisances. 1991
• Trump dodged the draft 5 times by having a doctor diagnose him with bone spurs.
• No Trump in America has ever served in the military; this spans 5 generations and every branch of the family tree. In fact, the reason his grandfather immigrated to America was to avoid military servic

Read this on the plane to CA. Lovely, eye-opening stuff. Can’t wait to read the second volume that will be out later this year. The style of the illustrations took some getting used to. Of note are the various scholarly critiques of the work.

In his book Dying of Whiteness, Metzl told of the case of a forty-one-year-old white taxi driver who was suffering from an inflamed liver that threatened the man’s life. Because the Tennessee legislature had neither taken up the Affordable Care Act nor expanded Medicaid coverage, the man was not able to get the expensive, lifesaving treatment that would have been available to him had he lived just across the border in Kentucky. As he approached death, he stood by the conviction that he did not want the government involved. “No way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens,” the man told Metzl. “Ain’t no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it. I would rather die.” And sadly, so he would.

Now,

You might wish to let that simmer for a few minutes. With his health as shaky as a Jenga tower, with his very life ebbing away, Trevor’s greater concern – his greater fear – was of undeserving “Mexicans or welfare queens” benefiting from his taxes, however much that might be on the wages of a used-to-be cab driver eking out his last days in a low-income housing facility.

If that’s sad and ridiculous – and it is both – it is also predictable. From the beginning, white fear has been a great, unspoken driver of this nation’s sins against difference. So Trevor is just a link in an unbroken line that binds Lincoln fretting about retribution from newly freed slaves, to Roosevelt worrying about treachery from Americans of Japanese heritage, to Trump seeing terrorism in brown-skinned toddlers on the southern border.

Decade after decade, election after election, so much of the white conservative appeal is an implicit promise to defend whiteness from blacks and browns. Metzl argues that white people themselves have borne and are bearing a terrific cost for this “defense,” that they are, in effect, killing themselves.

Paraphrasing a comment I read on Instagram: “You will let your Orange Highness shit on your head if it means that the liberal standing next to you has to smell it.”

• 47,245 Civilians Killed
• 2,442 US Troops Killed
• 20,666 US Troops Wounded
• 66,000 - 69,000 Afghan Troops Killed
• $2.26 Trillion Taxpayer Dollars

Via NPR. And then:

Just days before, Pardis had confided to his friend that he was receiving death threats from the Taliban, who had discovered he had worked as a translator for the United States Army for 16 months during the 20-year-long conflict.

“They were telling him you are a spy for the Americans, you are the eyes of the Americans and you are infidel, and we will kill you and your family,” his friend and co-worker Abdulhaq Ayoubi told CNN.

As he approached the checkpoint, Pardis put his foot on the accelerator to speed through. He was not seen alive again.

What a nightmare, twenty years on. And it’s not like the powers that be didn’t know what they were getting into. Heck, here’s a scene from Rambo (via WN)

Ah yes, I remember those times the ones on the left turned children into living bombs, hung good men from bridges after lighting them on fire, tossed gay men from roof tops, raped and genitally mutilated young children as well as women, targeted civilians with explosives as well as sniper fire… Oh wait that was the right side.
How about when they destroyed cultural landmarks in the name of their religion, beheaded men and women on camera, and were caught on the Flir camera of a drone gang banging a goat… Nope that was right side as well.

Ooof, the whataboutism and nationalism is off the charts in this one.

First off go ahead and downvote me, I know you can’t resist.

US military OEF/OIF veteran here, you’re really going to make me do this.

I’m a patriot who understands the USA has some serious fucking problems but I don’t cower and hide them and pretend we don’t have domestic radical extremists.

It’s why military members are sworn to protect against both foreign AND DOMESTIC threats.

First off, I’m muting replies to this because this isn’t for you, you’re already too lost in the sauce and drank the koolaid too deeply. This is for anyone else who thinks you even remotely have a point, because you absolutely don’t.

Let me just tell you about the left side photo guys for a second, bare with me it’s a bit long and ALL done under the same extremist right wing belief system.

Let’s rack it up, ready, here we go:

• Assasinated Medgar Evans (1963)
• Bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church (1963)
• Freedom Summer Murders (1964)
• Assassinated Viola Liuzzo (1964)
• Joseph Paul Franklin Murder Spree (1977-1980)
• The murder of Danny Lockin (1978)
• The Greensboro Massacre (1979)
• Lynching of Michael Donald (1981)
• The murder of Vincent Chin (1982)
• Murder of Alan Berg (1984)
• GoldMark Family Murder (1985)
• Murder of Mulugeta Seraw (1988)
• Murder of David Gunn (1993)
• Luigi’s Restaurant Shooting (1993)
• Ladies Center Shooting (1994)
• Brookline Abortion Clinic Shootings (1994)
• Oklahoma City Bombing (1995)
• Macedonia Baptist Church Arson (1995)

We only just started getting into the greatest hits of the American right wing’s domestic terrorists.

Let’s keep it up!

• Centennial Olympic Park Bombing (1996)
• Northside Family Planning Bombing (1997)
• Otherside Lounge Bombing (1997)
• Birmingham Abortion Clinic Bombing (1998)
• James Byrd’s Murder (1998)
• Murder of Matthew Shepard (1998)
• Murder of Barnett Slepian (1998)
• Murder of Gary Matson and Winfield Mowder (1999)
• Benjamin Smith’s Indiana and Illinois Murder Sprees (1999)
• Los Angeles Jewish Community Center Shooting (1999)
• Wedgewood Baptist Church Shooting (1999)

Wow these right wing guys really like bombing and shooting innocent people! Specifically people that seems to disagree with them or speak against them.

But noooo, no way way they’re like the Taliban, of course not.

Though they did do a lot in the 90s, hmm, let’s keep it going! 2000s here we come!

• Pittsburgh Shootings (2000)
• Murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi (2001)
• Dallas Murder Sprees (2001)
• Manhunt and Shootings of Jacob Robida (2006)
• Death of Sean Kennedy (2007)
• Knoxville Church Shooting (2008)
• Woodburn Bank Bombing (2008)
• Assassination of George Tiller (2009)
• UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM SHOOTING (2009)

Yeah they fucking shot up a Holocaust museum, but totally not like the taliban. Anyway let’s keep pushing:

• West Memphis Police Shootings (2010)
• Tucson Shootings (2011)
• Spokane Bombings (2011)
• Murder of James Craig Anderson (2011)
• Wisconsin Sikh Temple Shooting (2012)
• Los Angeles International Airport Shooting (2013)
• Overland Park Jewish Community Center Shooting (2014)
• Las Vegas Shootings (2014)
• Pennsylvania State Police Barracks Attack (2014)
• Charleston Church Shooting (2015)
• Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood Shooting (2015)
• Minneapolis Shooting (2016)
• Olathe, Kansas Shooting (2017)
• Murder of Timothy Caughman (2017)
• Portland Train Attack (2017)
• Assault of DeAndre Harris (2017)
• Charlottesville Car Attack (2017)
• Aztec High School Shooting (2017)
• Blaze Bernstein’s Murder (2018)
• US Mail Bombing Attempts (2018)
• Jefferstown Kroger Shooting (2018)
• Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting (2018)
• Escondido Mosque Arson (2019)
• Louisiana Multiple Black Church Fires (2019)
• Poway Synagogue Shooting (2019)
• Dallas Courthouse Shooting (2019)
• El Paso Shooting (2019)
• Boogaloo Killings (2020)

And of course, as a veteran my all time favorite of the right wings greatest hits:

The 2021 storming and assault on the United States Capitol in Washington D.C.

Amazing how consistent those right wing domestic terrorists are, literally active in every decade! Now that’s dedication to their cause!

Can’t wait to see their next “totally not at all terrorists like the taliban” efforts in the coming years.

As a veteran and a patriot I will gladly talk about all the good and fucking evil America has done. I’m not a fake nationalist who will pretend that shit didn’t happen because I want to hold my countrymen accountable and make this place better.

People like the poster above me is too deep into whataboutism and nationalism to ever see the fucking point.

The list for anyone who wants to explore:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_right-wing_terrorist_attacks

Yes, weeks after his buddy Bernie Kerik asked people to spare whatever they could for Giuliani‘s legal bills, the “Rudy Giuliani Legal Defense Fund” has raised a mere $9,590, or less than 0.2% of the $5 million goal. (It’s not clear if the RGLDF is a separate entity the “Rudy Giuilani Freedom Fund” that Kerik helped create.) Kerik, the former NYC police commissioner, knows a little something about legal woes, having pleaded guilty in 2010 to tax fraud and other charges, before being pardoned, of course, by Donald Trump. You may also recall Kerik from other hits like reportedly conducting an affair at an apartment near Ground Zero that had been reserved for 9/11 rescue workers. On the fundraising page, the organizers encourage whatever kind of person identifies as a Giuliani groupie to pony up as much cash as they can to defend the former president’s former attorney, explaining “The swamp is revolting by placing a bull’s eye on the backs of every Trump loyalist. That puts Rudy at the top of their list. Rudy’s fate will determine if America still is a Republic governed by We The People!” Sadly for Rudy, that pitch has apparently mostly fallen on deaf ears.

Another example of the Best People attracting other Best People 🤩 And I’m sure his illustrious client will swoop in and help him out with the $250 Million he wheedled out of his supporters?

[…] according to three people familiar with the matter, Trump, as well as several of his legal advisers and longtime confidants, have been hesitant about swooping in to help the embattled Giuliani, who for years worked as Trump’s personal lawyer, a political adviser, and attack dog.

[…] Over the decades and during his presidency, however, Trump has cemented a reputation for regularly turning his back on close allies and one-time loyalists, including when legal or political pressures became too hot for him.

You don’t say. Could be the Elite Strike-Force Team’s enviable success rate because, ordinarily, The Best People who are most loyal to their Orange Daddy get paid well and on-time:

• Elite Strike-Force Leader’s Supporters Beseech the Angry Yam to Pay for Services Rendered
• Stable Genius Client Halts Payments to Fearless Leader of his “Elite Strike-Force” Legal Team

Shitkraken is a gift that keeps on giving 💩

“Just say we won,” Giuliani reportedly instructed Trump’s team, explaining that they should simply declare victory in each battleground state. Giuliani is then said to have told Trump directly: “Just go declare victory right now… You’ve got to go declare victory now.”

Some solid strategery here. The Best People, folks. I want this to end but I don’t want it to end.

Of course. The Best People, folks. He did mention the use of “the binomial probability formula”, so there’s that at least. He’s being sued by Dominion Systems, along key members of his Daddy’s Elite Strike-Force Legal team.

Shitkraken keeps on giving ♥️

The Fearless Leader’s motion was denied as well. Pillow Bro as well. The best people.

“As an initial matter, there is no blanket immunity for statements that are “political” in nature: as the Court of Appeals has put it, the fact that statements were made in a “political ‘context’ does not indiscriminately immunize every statement contained therein.” It is true that courts recognize the value in some level of “imaginative expression” or “rhetorical hyperbole” in our public debate. But it is simply not the law that provably false statements cannot be actionable if made in the context of an election.

Wow. If I were a Patriot, I would also get tired of Liberal judges meting out this kind of treatment to my Orange Daddy’s defense team.

On June 7, 2018, President Trump announced his intent to nominate Nichols to serve as a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. On June 18, 2018, his nomination was sent to the Senate. President Trump nominated Nichols to the seat vacated by Richard W. Roberts, who took senior status on March 16, 2016.

Shitkraken keeps on giving ♥️

I think because the normalization of Trump and his erosion of political norms over the last 5 years, many people don’t seem to see just how unfathomably dangerous and downright fascist this entire situation has become.

Donald Trump lost. He lost. That is irrefutable and indisputable. He has refused to concede. Not only has he refused to concede, he’s actively telling his millions of supporters that he actually won and that the opposition STOLE the election from him. He’s not saying there was some counting error or computer malfunction. He claims that a crime was committed. It’s absolutely inexcusable and outright seditious, as many in this subbreddit already know.

The founding fathers, for all their faults as men, were not stupid. Far from it. They understood how critically important it was that the absolute powers of a monarch (or a despot/dictator) needed to be diffused among many, and that those many separate entities would need to act as checks on one another. That’s why there’s essentially three branches of government in every iteration of democracies around the world; they each hold a fraction of the power that was once reserved for a sole monarch. This division is a check against corruption and the inherent nature of power to corrupt those who wield it. The only reason that democracy - any democracy, not just the American version - can survive is through a peaceful transfer of power. Without it, there is chaos. Several thousand years of recorded history taught the founding fathers that when absolute power is concentrated in one individual, when that individual dies or are overthrown, countless people suffer. Endless wars of succession and conflicts over who has the rightful claim to power plagued us for generations. Without a peaceful and legally delineated method to hand diffuse power from one individual to the next, there’s nothing to stop someone from raising an army, crossing the proverbial Rubicon, and grabbing the reins of power by force. That’s the real magic of a democratic system: that we all collectively agree that the power of the state is peacefully and legally passed down without bloodshed or recrimination. It’s something that only works because we all believe it does, much like the inherent value of money. It’s something we take for granted, but it’s really astonishing given most of human history.

There is a method baked right into the constitution for someone who thinks they lost an election if they believe it was unfair, or corrupt, or stolen: You take it to the courts - to the separate branch - for it to be ruled on. It’s the reason why the president-elect doesn’t just assume power the day after the election. If there’s a legitimate claim to malfeasance or miscounting, it goes to the courts, each side presents its case, and the judicial branch has the time to weigh the evidence and make a ruling.

This isn’t just hypothetical - it’s already happened. In 2000 the electoral college came down to one state: Florida. Gore lost to Bush by less than a thousand votes. The night of the election Gore conceded, and then in the following days as the picture became more clear, he retracted his concession and took the matter to the courts. It went all the way to the Supreme Court, and he lost. They made their ruling and gave the election to Bush. That’s the way it’s supposed to happen, it’s how the founding fathers designed it. No civil war. No bloodshed.

Did Gore claim that the Bush stole the election? Did he sulk away to his mansion and call himself the “real” president? Did he whip his supporters into a frenzy, tell them to “stop the steal” and unleash them on the capital building when the votes were going to be certified? No. He conceded. Not only did he concede, he thanked his supporters for their hard work, congratulated Bush, and told his people to throw their support behind the President-elect. Because that’s what you do in a democracy. It’s not because he’s some decent guy, it’s your responsibility as a participant in the electoral process.

You throw your hat into the ring. You run your campaign and try to sway the voters. If you lose, you concede. It’s not just a formality, it’s critically important to the health of the country as a whole. Every candidate knows this. Kerry conceded in 2004. McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012. Nixon conceded when he lost to Kennedy in 1960, and Nixon was an irredeemable piece of shit. (Skip to 5:50 to hear Nixon describe the importance of concession and uniting around the victor)

Each speech is essentially the same: thanking supporters, officially conceding, and throwing your support behind the new president-elect and urging your supporters to do the same. Candidates, even the irredeemably shitty ones, know that elections are vicious and divisive, so effort needs to be made to try and unite afterwards. No one man is bigger or more important than the whole.

People need to have faith in the process, that elections are fair and free, and that the candidate with the most votes (or electoral votes) wins. If they doubt that very foundational premise some of them will resort to violence. They’ll resort to violence because they’ll believe that the legal channels for peaceful resolution aren’t relevant. That’s why the insurrectionists on January 6th thought they were being “patriots”. It’s a mass self-delusion that was perpetuated and allowed to fester and grow because Trump spent five years gaslighting the country and refusing to concede an election he lost. They might be ignorant authoritarians, but they wouldn’t be storming the capital without Trump and his big lie.

Trump had every legal right to contest the results of the 2020 election in the courts. He did. Over 60 lawsuits filed in multiple states. It went to the Supreme Court. He lost every single one. Those lawsuits failed or were tossed out because there was legitimately zero proof of the massive fraud and theft Trump was claiming.

The recent Vanity Fair interview with Trump is probably one of the scariest things I’ve read in a long while. Among the never-ending predictable lies and bullshit we come to expect from Trump came the fact that he was disappointed in the federal and state judges he appointed that decided against him or tossed out his lawsuits. He was upset with Brett Kavanagh and the conservative judges on the Supreme Court for their disloyalty. THEIR DISLOYALTY.

This is surreal. It’s beyond the pale. The President of the United States is upset that a separate branch of the federal government didn’t show him sufficient loyalty. What the everlasting fuck is this fascist nonsense? The federal government is not a mafia family. Federal judges don’t owe anyone loyalty - regardless of whether they’re from the same party or if they’ve been appointed by someone. Your merit is not judged on your loyalty, especially when your very role is to remain impartial and interpret the law. Judges are loyal to the constitution, not the President! It’s in their very oath of office!

This is why Trump is such a threat. It’s not just his ignorance, his incompetence, his vanity, his vindictiveness, his narcissism. Those are all horrible qualities to have. He’s a threat because he’s willing to completely disregard and tear down the very bedrock principles of democracy (the separation of authority and the peaceful transfer of power) to serve his needs. His ego can’t handle a loss, so the constitution and everything that makes democracy a functional alternative to despotism and authoritarianism can burn.

Trump isn’t just the worst president in history, he’s a threat to the very fabric of the country. Because of the slow crawl of his erosion of norms, the frenetic pace of 24 hour news, the short attention span of our modern society, and a media obsessed with ratings over information, Trump has been allowed to get away with this behaviour. The fact that Republicans are lining up and falling over each other to supplicate themselves before this man should be a stain that should never wash off and should be their legacy. If there is any justice in the world, history will not be kind to these enabling sycophants who actively helped this cancerous growth.

I wish I was being hyperbolic, I really do. But there’s no other way to see that one political party and millions of Americans are not only fine with authoritarianism, but will actively cheer it on and promote its rise.

Sure, a case can be made that this was inevitable given the course of the Republican party for the last 30 years. Trump is a mutated strain of their brand of “conservatism” which doesn’t really seem to stand for anything at this point beyond the acquisition and protection of power. But Trump is still far more dangerous than the original pathogen: he’s a force that wants to ensure that facts don’t mean anything and that loyalty is the only currency that matters.

Sometimes I feel like I’m screaming into the void about some of this, but I feel like Trump’s antics and firehose of bullshit is causing millions of people to lose sight of the forest for the trees. Hell, they’re losing sight of the galaxy for the pebbles of sand on the beach.

The only way I see out of this is if he faces legal ramifications for what he’s done. If he’s permitted to get away with it, and run in 2024, and win? That’s the absolute nightmare scenario.

Just some quick notes about a piece of shit from the hit machine that is Conservative Tech.

The Freedom Phone is another grift for those inside the Sphere of Shit who are upset that their Orange Daddy got censored by Facebook (that mighty ethical paragon of Silicon Valley) and Twitter (they aight.) It’s about empowering Conservatives, and is a fine device for Newsmax-lobotomized patriots who proactively disregard their own digital safety and well-being in the interest of sticking it to the Libs as much as possible.

Hardware #

It’s a skinned Umdigi A9 Pro you can pick up from AliExpress for $120 but which is sold through the website for $500 (plus $20 shipping because the grift never stops.)

It’s manufactured in Shenzhen, China, although you can totally ignore this like the good Conservative you are and lie about how it’s actually made in Hong Kong (which is a part of China) and hence supports the good democratic anti-China people there with zero fucking evidence.

Software #

It runs FreedomOS, of course, which is a “blend of AOSP, LineageOS, GrapheneOS, and our personal development.” Because you have total and complete Freedom of Choice, it has preloaded Conservative-friendly apps like MeWe, Parler, Newsmax, and Rumble (a YouTube competitor that will definitely be around two years from now.)

Need more Conservative-friendly apps? You can get them from the uncensorable “PatriApp Store.” Yes, that’s the actual name. Who needs Liberal creatives when you can just ask your Aunt Sally to smush some shit together? And no more Big Tech censoring you! ‘Uncensorable’ also absolves the PatriApp store of any responsibility apropos terrible exploitative or neo-Nazi content. Freedom is freedom is freedom.

Security #

It’s a fucking nightmare. But it’s not a problem if you’re willing to give up on personal liberty, safety, ethics, humanity, and data if you’ve just had it with anyone who hurts your Daddy’s fee-fees and doesn’t love him as much as you do.

Founder #

It’s Erik Finman. He has, in his own words, “made it in Silicon Valley and accomplished a lot in my life already.” How, you ask? He invested in BitCoin when he was a wee lad and his investment is now worth some millions.

That’s it.

But winning the lottery makes this Discount Bin Steve Jobs completely trustworthy and eminently capable of dealing with supply-chains, ISPs, regulatory bodies, software and hardware engineering, and the few thousand moving parts needed to create a modern phone and ecosystem worth a shit. It’s not his fault though. As Conservatives like to say, the problem isn’t tech oligopolies… it’s regulation bro 🧐😡

Product Pitch #

Enjoy. Plucking MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech out of its context is totally appropriate here.

People Using It #

Absolute fucking morons aside, a few Conservative people with large followings did express a lot of interest in this horror but appear to still spew their bile onto the internet with their iPhones and Androids.

Pathetic and Evil:

“The next time you see someone in a mask on the sidewalk or on the bike path, do not hesitate,” Carlson said. “Ask politely but firmly: ‘Would you please take off your mask? Science shows there is no reason for you to be wearing it. Your mask is making me uncomfortable.’”

“As for forcing children to wear masks outside, that should be illegal,” Carlson told viewers. “Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from your response to seeing someone beat a kid in Walmart. Call the police immediately, contact child protective services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What you’re looking at is abuse, it’s child abuse and you are morally obligated to attempt to prevent it.”

and

“As for forcing children to wear masks outside, that should be illegal,” Carlson told viewers. “Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from your response to seeing someone beat a kid in Walmart. Call the police immediately, contact child protective services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What you’re looking at is abuse, it’s child abuse and you are morally obligated to attempt to prevent it.” He continued: “If it’s your own children being abused, then act accordingly. Let’s say your kids’ school emailed you and announced that every day after lunch, your sixth-grader was going to get punched in the face by a teacher. How would you respond to that? That’s precisely how you should respond when they tell you that your kids have to wear masks on the soccer field. That is unacceptable, it is dangerous, and we should act like it, because it is. But too few of us have responded like that, we have been shamefully passive in the face of all of this.”

Pathetic Douchebag is like watching a dumpster catch fire slowly. Evil Douchebag wouldn’t be worth thinking about if it weren’t for his reach and the preventable deaths he’s directly responsible for.

I don’t think any logical arguments are going make an iota of difference to the Death Cult that counts about half this country as gleeful members. Unless these arguments are stated breathlessly by the Prince of Conservative Free-Market Logic himself.

So this was essentially nothing more than a cathartic watch.

In Texas, all but 43 of ~9,000 COVID-related deaths since mid-February were unvaccinated people (source). 99.8% of deaths in in Los Angeles were among unvaccinated people. 100% of deaths in Maryland. The unvaccinated account for 99.2% of all deaths nationwide at the time of this writing.

You can make an excellent guess about a how state tilts politically by just looking at the vaccination rates.

---

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And yet, inside The Sphere of Bullshit, and at the Confluence of Jubilant Idiots,

Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top Biden administration adviser, said Sunday that it was “horrifying” to see people at the Conservative Political Action Conference cheering because the government has not been able to get more of the country vaccinated.

“They are cheering about someone saying that it’s a good thing for people not to try and save their lives,” Fauci said. “It’s almost frightening.”

It’s a horrifying way to die, knowing that there was at least an 80% chance that your fate could’ve been avoided. Knowing that you’ve been cheated and lied to for cheap engagement metrics and political points that enriched evil assholes who don’t care about you.

This is a second wave that affects people who are (and I have to muster every ounce of empathy to think of as) victims of Conservative and Social media (Facebook in particular.)

“A few days later when I call time of death,” continued [Dr. Brytney] Cobia on Facebook, “I hug their family members and I tell them the best way to honor their loved one is to go get vaccinated and encourage everyone they know to do the same.”

“They cry. And they tell me they didn’t know. They thought it was a hoax. They thought it was political. They thought because they had a certain blood type or a certain skin color they wouldn’t get as sick. They thought it was ‘just the flu’. But they were wrong. And they wish they could go back. But they can’t. So they thank me and they go get the vaccine. And I go back to my office, write their death note, and say a small prayer that this loss will save more lives.”

Remonstrations over ‘socialist’ ideas like “other people” (like children under 12, the immunocompromised, older people), “herd immunity”, and “variant factories” will mean very little in the larger cult of hyperindividualism.

So here we go again. I don’t think we’re shutting anything down this time¹. I suppose this is A-OK with the Death Cult that just wants you to just “ride out” a pandemic (and Climate Change!)

https://mobile.twitter.com/NotHoodlum/status/1421893529681399815
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/07/26/covid-vaccine-regrets/
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/26/us/florida-coronavirus-hospital-surge/index.html
https://nowthisnews.com/politics/governor-of-lowest-vaccination-state-its-time-to-start-blaming-unvaccinated-folks

Around 90% of people in India are lactose intolerant. Lactose tolerance is based on a mutation that emerged convergently in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East around 10,000 years ago.

Results from this paper:

https://www.uchicagomedicine.org/forefront/gastrointestinal-articles/lactose-tolerance-in-the-indian-dairyland

I’d really hoped that this embarrassment would’ve been forgotten a few weeks after January 6th. But here we are.

“Should an attorney be sanctioned for his or her failure to withdraw allegations the attorney came to know were untrue?,” [U.S. Judge Linda Parker] said during a court hearing held by video conference. “Is that sanctionable behavior?”

She said she thought affidavits in the case had been submitted in “bad faith.”

[…] Parker dismissed the Michigan lawsuit last December, saying in a written decision that Powell’s voter fraud claims were “nothing but speculation and conjecture” and that, in any event, Powell waited too long to file her lawsuit.

[…] “What they filed was an embarrassment to the legal profession,” David Fink, a lawyer for the city of Detroit said during Monday’s hearing. “This was a sloppy and careless effort.”

During the hearing, Parker asked Powell and her co-counsel why they did not voluntarily dismiss their Michigan case on Dec. 14 when the Electoral College formally confirmed Biden’s election victory.

“Why did the plaintiffs not recognize this lawsuit as moot and dismiss it on that date?,” Parker asked.

Donald Campbell, the attorney representing Sidney Powell and the other lawyers, replied that the election was “fluid” and unpredictable and that the pro-Trump legal team believed its lawsuit was still viable after Dec. 14.

The Best People 👌

A simple-enough argument about a dangerous, toxic worldview.

[…] To highlight that contradiction let’s try to explain these facts with individualist logic. Women and non-white people, by sheer coincidence, all individually chose to be paid less for more demanding jobs. Also by coincidence, they chose to work those jobs and be paid less than women and non-white people in other similarly developed countries. Simultaneously, people born in the same zip codes all just happened to make choices that led them to similar incomes, similar lifespans, and similar rates of disease. Those born to poor families chose, with little or no outside influence, to work lower paying jobs. The rich also chose, of their own accord and without significant systemic advantages, to work higher paying jobs. The huge differences in the inequalities between America and other wealthy nations is also a coincidence caused by Americans choosing to be lazier.

Rather than consider that centuries of enslavement and systemic racism has sabotaged the quality of life for black americans, individualists insist that black individuals choose to live in poverty more frequently than non-black people. Rather than consider that society exists, individualists have created a web of absurdities and chosen to live there. They also insist that none of these absurdities are racist, sexist, or classist. We shouldn’t temper our language here: anyone who claims that individual choices rather than systems entirely determine how most people live should be dismissed outright. It’s an embarrassing and absurd worldview and even the tiniest bit of research should make that clear.

[…] Individualism is a worldview created not to explain the world but to control it. It’s designed to fragment strong communities, turn workers against each other, and diminish the power of solidarity among the people. When you see yourself as the morally upright hero and everyone else has competition, you’re turning your back on what it means to be human. There’s plenty to go around, or at least there would be if it weren’t all funneled straight to the top, to the people who manufactured the idea of individualism.

See also: “We Ought to Live in a Society, not an Economy”

It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.

Not at all crazy. They’re just kidding. Can’t you take a joke?

I do love the Bible verses. I am told this is exactly the sort of thing Jesus would’ve wanted. Source.

Brian Hayes’ entire article is

This led him to miss a court hearing where his own lawyer sought to dismiss a billion-dollar defamation case against him. This is because the Strike-Force Honcho made “false and misleading” claims about the equipment used in the 2020 election on behalf of his Stable Genius client.

I wonder how much alcoholism this saga of shit has induced in folks who write political satire for a living. It just never ends.

Happy Father’s Day to the fathers, stepfathers, grandfathers, and father figures who enrich our character, love us unconditionally, and give so much of themselves every day so we can live lives worthy of their dreams and sacrifices.

And, this is real (as much as you hope it isn’t but know deep-down that it is):

Happy Father’s Day to all, including the Radical Left, RINOs, and other Losers of the world. Hopefully, eventually, everyone will come together!

I do love the capitalized “Losers”.

I finish just by saying this: war is an easy thing to talk about; there are not many people - a - of the generation that remember it. The right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup served with distinction in the last war. I never killed anyone but I wore uniform. But I was in London in the blitz in 1940, living in the Millbank tower, where I was born. Some different ideas have come in since. And every night, I went down to the shelter in Thames house. Every morning, I saw dockland burning. Five hundred people were killed in Westminster one night by a land mine. It was terrifying. Aren’t Arabs terrified? Aren’t Iraqis terrified? Don’t Arab and Iraqi women weep when their children die? Does bombing strengthen their determination? What fools we are to live in a generation for which war is a computer game for our children and just an interesting little channel for news item.

Every Member of Parliament tonight who votes for the Government motion will be consciously and deliberately accepting responsibility for the deaths of innocent people if the war begins, as I fear it will. Now that’s for their decision to take. But this is a quite unique debate. In my parliamentary experience, where we are asked to share responsibility for a decision we won’t really be taking, with consequences for people who have no part to play in the brutality of the regime which we are dealing with.

And I finish with this: on 24 October 1945—the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup will remember—the United Nations charter was passed. And the words of that charter are etched into my mind and move me even as I think of them. “We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our life-time has caused untold suffering to mankind”. That was the pledge of that generation to this generation, and it would be the greatest betrayal of all if we voted to abandon the charter, and take unilateral action and pretend that we were doing it in the name of the international community. And I shall vote against the motion for the reasons that I have given the house.

by @gryzlock

I wonder if our hero has any vacation plans he’d care to share with a judge who might acquit him and his lol-dad. (Cached)

I still remember Giuliani’s stature and gravitas 20 years ago, when I arrived in this country. How the mighty have fallen. It’s almost as if The Orange Sphere of Shit corrupts all those who enter it. And comically so in the case of America’s Mayor.

Rick Wilson, the GOP political consultant who credits Giuliani with making his career, says he will defend to his dying breath the Giuliani of 9/11, but he adds, “It’s a cliché that if you live long enough, you’ll see your heroes become villains.”

As Giuliani’s friends have slipped away over the years, some have been replaced by people who the Rudy of 35 years ago would have put in prison.

[…] What emerges is a portrait of a man who was given a hero’s mantle, but it rested on flawed shoulders. Even the aftermath of September 11th, the defining point of Giuliani’s life, held the seeds of his undoing, as he has spent two decades alternatively exploiting and trying to get back to that transcendent moment when all of America embraced him. And yet, time and again, he has been undone by his all-too-human failings.

Thought it would be “Hereditary” but about immigration/asylum instead of family and motherhood. Poignant explorations of survivor’s guilt and trauma. Just amazingly well acted. Imagine Syrian… here. ocean… treated like crap by your fellow survivors, treated like crap by the assimilated (who in turn are treated like crap)

And this is Remi Weekes directorial debut!

May 2018

The Trump Administration disbands the White House pandemic response team.

July 2019

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) epidemiologist embedded in China’s disease control agency left the post, and the Trump Administration eliminated the role.

Oct. 2019

“Currently, there are insufficient funding sources designated for the federal government to use in response to a severe influenza pandemic.” [Source: The results of a Department of Health and Human Services 2019 influenza pandemic simulation]

Jan. 22, 2020

“We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”

Jan. 24, 2020

Trump praises China’s handling of the coronavirus: “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”

Jan. 28, 2020

“This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency…This is going to be the roughest thing you face” Trump’s National Security Advisor to Trump

Jan. 30, 2020

“The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on US soil… This lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.” [Memo from Trump Trade Advisor Peter Navarro]

Feb. 2, 2020

“We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”

Feb. 7, 2020

“It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu… This is deadly stuff” [Trump in a private interview with Bob Woodward from The Washington Post made public on Sept. 9, 2020]

Feb. 10, 2020

“I think the virus is going to be—it’s going to be fine.”

Feb. 10, 2020

“Looks like by April, you know in theory when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”

Feb. 24, 2020

“The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA… the Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”

Feb. 25, 2020

“CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.”

Feb. 25, 2020

“I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away… They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.”

Feb. 26, 2020

“The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”

Feb. 26, 2020

“We’re going very substantially down, not up.”

Feb. 26, 2020

“Well, we’re testing everybody that we need to test. And we’re finding very little problem. Very little problem.”

Feb. 26, 2020

“This is a flu. This is like a flu.”

Feb. 27, 2020

“It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

Feb. 27, 2020

“The ineptness with which the Trump Administration approached this problem is not only serious, it can be deadly if not changed in the approach.” – Rep. Lloyd Doggett [During a hearing, Rep. Doggett questions HHS Sec. Azar on Trump’s refusal to take this virus seriously, warning about mask and test shortages]

Feb. 28, 2020

“We’re ordering a lot of supplies. We’re ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn’t be ordering unless it was something like this. But we’re ordering a lot of different elements of medical.”

March 2, 2020

“You take a solid flu vaccine, you don’t think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?” [Trump to health officials who answered “No.”]

March 2, 2020

“A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they’re happening very rapidly.”

March 4, 2020

“Now, and this is just my hunch, and — but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this. Because a lot people will have this and it’s very mild.”

March 4, 2020

“If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better.”

March 5, 2020

“I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work.”

March 5, 2020

“The United States… has, as of now, only 129 cases… and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!”

March 6, 2020

“I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down.”

March 6, 2020

“You have to be calm. It’ll go away.”

March 6, 2020

“Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. They’re there. And the tests are beautiful… the tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good.”

March 6, 2020

“I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it… Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”

March 6, 2020

“I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”

March 7, 2020

"No, I’m not concerned at all.

March 8, 2020

“We have a perfectly coordinated and fine-tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus.”

March 9, 2020

During a news conference, White House officials said the U.S. will have tested one million people that week and thereafter would complete 4 million tests per week. By the end of the week, the CDC had only completed a paltry 4,000 tests.

March 10, 2020

“Just stay calm. It will go away.”

March 11, 2020

The World Health Organization categorizes the coronavirus as a pandemic due to its alarming spread and severity.

March 11, 2020

“It goes away…It’s going away. We want it to go away with very, very few deaths.”

March 12, 2020

“The system is not really geared to what we need right now…That is a failing. Let’s admit it.” [Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to Congress]

March 12, 2020

“You know, you see what’s going on. And so I just wanted that to stop as it pertains to the United States. And that’s what we’ve done. We’ve stopped it.”

March 13, 2020

“I don’t take responsibility at all.”

March 13, 2020

The Atlantic reports that less than 14,000 tests have been done in the ten weeks since the Administration had first been notified of the virus, though Mike Pence had promised the week prior that 1.5 million tests would be available by this time.

March 14, 2020

“I’d rate it a ten,” [Trump’s rating of his coronavirus response]

March 15, 2020

“Relax”

March 15, 2020

“This is a very contagious virus. It’s incredible. But it’s something that we have tremendous control over.”

March 16, 2020

“Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment-try getting it yourselves,”

March 17, 2020

“The only thing we haven’t done well is get good press.”

March 17, 2020

“I felt like it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

March 19, 2020

I intended “to always play it down.” [Trump in a private taped interview with Bob Woodward, made public on September 9]

March 20, 2020

“I say that you’re a terrible reporter, that’s what I say. I think it’s a very nasty question, and I think it’s a very bad signal that you’re putting out to the American people.” [Response to reporter’s question: “What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now who are scared?”]

March 22, 2020

“WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.”

March 24, 2020

“I’m also hopeful to have Americans working again by that Easter - that beautiful Easter day.”

March 24, 2020

“We’ve never closed down the country for the flu,” Trump said. “So you say to yourself, what is this all about?”

March 24, 2020

“They have to treat us well, also. They can’t say, ‘Oh, gee, we should get this, we should get that.’”

March 25, 2020

“The faster we go back, the better it’s going to be.”

March 26, 2020

The United States becomes the country with the most confirmed coronavirus cases. A title it keeps for the remainder of Trump’s time in office.

March 26, 2020

“Congratulations AMERICA!” [On Senate passage of third relief bill]

March 26, 2020

“I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators. You go into major hospitals sometimes, and they’ll have two ventilators. And now all of a sudden they’re saying, ‘Can we order 30,000 ventilators?’”

March 26, 2020

“We’ve had a big problem with the young, a woman governor from — you know who I’m talking about — from Michigan,”

March 27, 2020

“I love Michigan, one of the reasons we are doing such a GREAT job for them during this horrible Pandemic. Yet your Governor, Gretchen “Half” Whitmer is way in over her head, she doesn’t have a clue. Likes blaming everyone for her own ineptitude!”

March 27, 2020

“Mike, don’t call the governor of Washington. You’re wasting your time with him…”

March 27, 2020

“I want them to be appreciative. We’ve done a great job.”

March 27, 2020

“We’re doing a great job for the state of Washington and I think the Governor…he’s constantly chirping and I guess complaining would be a nice way of saying it.”

March 29, 2020

“Where are the masks going? Are they going out the back door? How do you go from 10,000 to 300,000?”

March 29, 2020

“Unfortunately the enemy is death. It’s death. A lot of people are dying. So it’s very unpleasant.”

March 30, 2020

“Stay calm, it will go away. You know it – you know it is going away, and it will go away, and we’re going to have a great victory.”

March 30, 2020

“I think New York should be fine, based on the numbers that we see, they should have more than enough. I mean, I’m hearing stories that they’re not used or they’re not used right.”

March 30, 2020

“I haven’t heard about testing in weeks. We’re testing more than any other nation in the world. We’ve got these great tests…But I haven’t heard about testing being a problem.”

March 30, 2020

“We inherited a broken test — the whole thing was broken.”

March 31, 2020

“…it’s not the flu. It’s vicious.”

April 1, 2020

“They have to treat us well, also. They can’t say, 'Oh, gee, we should get this, we should get that.” [Trump’s response to governors who were pleading for medical gear and ventilators to treat surging coronavirus hospitalizations]

April 2, 2020

“Massive amounts of medical supplies… are being delivered directly to states…Some have insatiable appetites & are never satisfied (politics?). The complainers should have been stocked up and ready long before this crisis hit.”

April 2, 2020

“…the Federal Government is merely a back-up for state governments.”

April 3, 2020

“I’m feeling good. I just don’t want to be doing – somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful resolute desk, the great resolute desk, I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens, I don’t know, somehow I don’t see it for myself. I just don’t. Maybe I’ll change my mind.”

April 5, 2020

“FEMA, the military — what they’ve done is a miracle…And you should be thanking them for what they’ve done, not always asking wise-guy questions.” [Trump’s response to a reporter when asked about slow government response to coronavirus]

April 6, 2020

“LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL!”

April 6, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 10,000

April 7, 2020

“So, you know, things are happening. It’s a – it’s – I haven’t seen bad. I’ve not seen bad.”

April 7, 2020

“You are not going to die from this pill…I really think it’s a great thing to try.” [Trump promoting Hydroxychloroquine, not FDA approved to treat coronavirus]

April 7, 2020

“That was a flu. OK. So you could say that I said it was a flu, or you could say the flu is nothing to – sneeze at,” [Regarding Spanish Flu]

April 8, 2020

“I read about it maybe a day, two days ago… It was a recommendation that he had, I think he told certain people on the staff, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t see it.” [Trump referring to Peter Navarro’s January warning]

April 9, 2020

“I couldn’t have done it any better,” [When asked if his coronavirus response could have been better]

April 11, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 20,000

April 13, 2020

“But I guess I’m doing OK, because, to the best of my knowledge, I’m the President of the United States, despite the things that are said.”

April 14, 2020

“Enough!” [When a reporter questioned his claim that his authority as president is “total”]

April 14, 2020

“[w]hen somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total.”

April 15, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 30,000

April 15, 2020

As Trump focuses on reopening, a leaked CDC and FEMA report warns of “significant risk of resurgence of the virus” with phased reopening.

April 19, 2020

“Now we’re going toward 50, I’m hearing, or 60,000 people [dead from the coronavirus]”

April 20, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 40,000

April 22, 2020

“If [coronavirus] comes back though, it won’t be coming back in the form that it was, it will be coming back in smaller doses that we can contain…it’s also possible it doesn’t come back at all.”

April 23, 2020

“I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? As you see, it gets in the lungs, it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”

April 23, 2020

“So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether its ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said, that hasn’t been checked but you’re gonna test it. And then I said, supposing it brought the light inside the body, which you can either do either through the skin or some other way…”

April 23, 2020

“You see states are starting to open up now, and it’s very exciting to see,”

April 23, 2020

Over 26 million jobless claims have been filed

April 24, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 50,000

April 26, 2020

“The people that know me and know the history of our Country say that I am the hardest working President in history.”

April 27, 2020

“I can’t imagine why,” [Trump’s response to the influx in poison control calls about disinfectant]

April 29, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 60,000

April 29, 2020

“It’s gonna go away, this is going to go away.”

May 3, 2020

“Look, we’re going to lose anywhere from 75,000, 80,000 to 100,000 people,”

May 5, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 70,000

May 5, 2020

Consumer debt hits an all-time high

May 5, 2020

“Well run States should not be bailing out poorly run States, using CoronaVirus as the excuse!”

May 5, 2020

“I always felt 60, 65, 70, as horrible as that is. I mean, you’re talking about filling up Yankee Stadium with death! So I thought it was horrible. But it’s probably going to be somewhat higher than that,”

May 5, 2020

“There’ll be more death, that the virus will pass, with or without a vaccine. And I think we’re doing very well on the vaccines but, with or without a vaccine, it’s going to pass, and we’re going to be back to normal,”

May 5, 2020

“I don’t want to be Mr. Gloom-and-Doom. It’s a very bad subject… I’m not looking to tell the American people when nobody really knows what’s happening yet, ‘Oh, this is going to be so tragic.’”

May 6, 2020

The Brookings Institution reports that children were “experiencing food insecurity to an extent unprecedented in modern times” and “40.9 percent of mothers with children ages 12 and under reported household food insecurity since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.” Republicans block proposals to expand food stamps.

May 6, 2020

“Sporadic for you, but not sporadic for a lot of other people.” [Trump’s response to a nurse telling him that equipment supply has been “sporadic”]

May 7, 2020

Over 33 million jobless claims have been filed

May 8, 2020

“This is going to go away without a vaccine. It is going to go away. We are not going to see it again.”

May 9, 2020

“This is going to go away without a vaccine.”

May 11, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 80,000

May 11, 2020

“Coronavirus numbers are looking MUCH better, going down almost everywhere. Big progress being made!”

May 11, 2020

“We have met the moment and we have prevailed,”

May 14, 2020

“Could be that testing’s, frankly, overrated. Maybe it is overrated.”

May 14, 2020

“Don’t forget, we have more cases than anybody in the world. But why? Because we do more testing,”

May 15, 2020

"Vaccine or no vaccine, we’re back. And we’re starting the process. In many cases, they don’t have vaccines and a virus or a flu comes and you fight through it.

May 16, 2020

“We’ve done a GREAT job on Covid response, making all Governors look good, some fantastic (and that’s OK), but the Lamestream Media doesn’t want to go with that narrative, and the Do Nothing Dems talking point is to say only bad about “Trump”. I made everybody look good, but me!”

May 18, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 90,000

May 19, 2020

“When we have a lot of cases, I don’t look at that as a bad thing, I look at that as, in a certain respect, as being a good thing… Because it means our testing is much better. I view it as a badge of honor, really, it’s a badge of honor.”

May 21, 2020

USA Today reports that home mortgage delinquencies surged by 1.6 million in April, the largest single-month jump in history.

May 22, 2020

Over 38 million jobless claims have been filed

May 27, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 100,000

May 29, 2020

“We will be today terminating our relationship with the World Health Organization”

June 6, 20202

U.S death toll passes 110,000

June 6, 2020

“Hopefully George is looking down right now and saying this is a great thing that’s happening for our country…This is a great day for him. It’s a great day for everybody. This is a great day for everybody. This is a great, great day in terms of equality.” [Trump referring to George Floyd, who was murdered on May 25, 2020.]

June 15, 2020

“At some point this stuff goes away and it’s going away.”

June 17, 2020

“It’s fading away. It’s going to fade away.”

June 18, 2020

“And it is dying out. The numbers are starting to get very good.”

June 20, 2020

“Testing is a double-edged sword… When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases, so I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’”

June 22, 2020

U.S death toll passes 120,000

June 23, 2020

“Cases are going up in the U.S. because we are testing far more than any other country, and ever expanding. With smaller testing we would show fewer cases!”

June 23, 2020

“It’s going away,”

June 25, 2020

“The number of ChinaVirus cases goes up, because of GREAT TESTING, while the number of deaths (mortality rate), goes way down. The Fake News doesn’t like telling you that!”

June 25, 2020

“Coronavirus deaths are way down. Mortality rate is one of the lowest in the World. Our Economy is roaring back and will NOT be shut down. “Embers” or flare ups will be put out, as necessary!”

June 30, 2020

The U.S. has just 4% of the global population, but 25% of global coronavirus cases and the second-highest death rate per capita.

July 1, 2020

“I think we’re going to be very good with the coronavirus.” “I think that, at some point, that’s going to sort of disappear, I hope.”

July 6, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 130,000

July 7, 2020

“I think we are in a good place.”

July 7, 2020

The president predicted that in the next two to four weeks, “I think we’re going to be in very good shape.”

July 8, 2020

“In Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and many other countries, SCHOOLS ARE OPEN WITH NO PROBLEMS. The Dems think it would be bad for them politically if U.S. schools open before the November election, but it is important for the children & families. May cut off funding if not open!”

July 8, 2020

“I disagree with @CDCgov on their very tough & expensive guidelines for opening schools. While they want them open, they are asking school [sic] to do very impractical things. I will be meeting with them!!!”

July 18, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 140,000

July 19, 2020

“I think we have one of the lowest mortality rates in the world”

July 19, 2020

“Many of those cases are young people that would heal in a day”

“They have the sniffles, and we put it down as a test”

July 21, 2020

“You will never hear this on the Fake News concerning the China Virus, but by comparison to most other countries, who are suffering greatly, we are doing very well - and we have done things that few other countries could have done!”

July 27, 2020

“America will develop a vaccine very soon, and we will defeat the virus. We will have it delivered in record time.”

July 28, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 150,000

July 28, 2020

“He’s got this high approval rating. So why don’t I have a high approval rating with respect – and the administration – with respect to the virus?” (Trump referring to Anthony Fauci)

Aug. 1, 2020

“Wrong! We have more cases because we have tested far more than any other country, 60,000,000. If we tested less, there would be less cases,” (Donald Trump in a retweet of Anthony Fauci saying the U.S. has seen more cases than European countries because it only shut down a fraction of its economy amid the pandemic)

Aug. 3, 2020

“I think we are doing very well and I think … as well as any nation,”

Aug. 3, 2020

“They are dying. That’s true. And you — it is what it is.”

Aug. 3, 2020

“OPEN THE SCHOOLS!!!”

Aug. 3, 2020

“Right now I think it’s under control.”

Aug. 3, 2020

“You know, there are those that say you can test too much, you do know that.”

Aug. 4, 2020

“…we have among the lowest numbers.” - White House Press Briefing

Aug. 5, 2020

“If you look at children, children are almost - and I would almost say definitely - but almost immune from this disease.”

Aug. 5, 2020

“We’re supplying the world now with ventilators. You go back four months, we didn’t have any.” - Fox and Friends

Aug. 5, 2020

“It will go away like things go away”

Aug. 6, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 160,000

Aug. 12, 2020

U.S. reports the highest number of COVID-19 deaths in one day since mid-May

Aug. 16, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 170,000

Aug. 19, 2020

New York Times report reveals that in December 2020 that Trump yelled, “You’re killing me! This whole thing is! We’ve got all the damn cases…I want to do what Mexico does. They don’t give you a test till you get to the emergency room and you’re vomiting,” at Jared Kushner during an August 19, 2020 meeting.

Aug. 22, 2020

“Many doctors and studies disagree with this!” (Donald Trump in a quote tweet of a Twitter moment stating that the FDA is revoking hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine for COVID-19 treatment, as they are “unlikely to be effective”)

Aug. 22, 2020

“The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics. Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd. Must focus on speed, and saving lives!”

Aug. 23, 2020

The President claims that ballot drop boxes are a “voter security disaster” and a “big fraud,” “possible for a person to vote multiple times” and that they aren’t “Covid sanitized.”

Aug. 26, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 180,000

Aug. 31, 2020

“We’ve done a great job in Covid but we don’t get the credit.”

Aug. 31, 2020

Over Six million Americans have tested positive for the coronavirus.

Sept. 4, 2020

There will be a vaccine “before the end of the year and maybe even before Nov. 1. I think we can probably have it sometime in October.”

Sept. 9, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 190,000

Sept. 10, 2020

“I really do believe that we are rounding the corner. The vaccines are right there”

Sept. 10, 2020

“This is nobody’s fault but China.”

Sept. 10, 2020

“We’ve possibly done the best job”

Sept. 10, 2020

“We have rounded the final turn”

Sept. 10, 2020

“I think that we’ve probably done the best job of any country”

Sept. 14, 2020

Trump was asked if he is afraid of Coronavirus risk at his rallies: “I’m on a stage, it’s very far away, so I’m not at all concerned.”

Sept. 16, 2020

“If you take the blue states out, we’re at a level I don’t think anybody in the world would be at.”

Sept. 16, 2020

Reporter: “[The head of the CDC] said that the vaccine for the general public wouldn’t be available until next Summer or maybe even early fall. Are you comfortable with that timeline?” Trump: “I think he made a mistake when he said that. That’s just incorrect information.”

Sept. 19, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 200,000

Sept. 21, 2020

“Take your hat off to the young because they have a hell of an immune system. But [the virus] affects virtually nobody. It’s an amazing thing. By the way, open your schools everybody, open your schools.”

Sept. 21, 2020

“We’re rounding the corner,” “With or without a vaccine. They hate when I say that but that’s the way it is. … We’ve done a phenomenal job. Not just a good job, a phenomenal job. Other than public relations, but that’s because I have fake news. On public relations, I give myself a D. On the job itself, we take an A+.”

Sept. 21, 2020

“In some states, thousands of people — nobody young. Below the age of 18, like, nobody. They have a strong immune system, who knows? Take your hat off to the young, because they have a hell of an immune system. But it affects virtually nobody. It’s an amazing thing. By the way, open your schools everybody, open your schools.”

Sept. 23, 2020

“I think we’re rounding the turn very much.”

Sept. 28, 2020

"And I say, and I’ll say it all the time: We’re rounding the corner. And, very importantly, vaccines are coming, but we’re rounding the corner regardless. But vaccines are coming, and they’re coming fast. "

Sept. 29, 2020

"Well, so far we have had no problem whatsoever. " [Trump referring to the thousands of people attending his rallies]

October 2, 2020

Trump and the First Lady test positive for Coronavirus. More than a dozen White House staff and aides test positive shortly thereafter.

Oct. 5, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 210,000

Oct. 5, 2020

“Don’t be afraid of Covid.”

Oct. 6, 2020

“Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, die from the Flu, Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!” [Source: Trump Tweet and Facebook Post, both were taken down]

Oct. 10, 2020

“But it’s going to disappear; it is disappearing.”

Oct. 11, 2020

“…We have done a “phenomenal” job, according to certain governors. Many people agree…And now come the Vaccines & Cures, long ahead of projections!”

Oct. 12, 2020

“Under my leadership, we’re delivering a safe vaccine and a rapid recovery like nobody can even believe. And if you look at our upward path, no country in the world has recovered the way we’ve recovered economically or otherwise, not even close.”

Oct. 12, 2020

“I went through it. Now, they say I’m immune. I can feel—I feel so powerful.”

Oct. 12, 2020

“When this first came out, if we didn’t do a good job, they predicted 2.2 million people would die, we’re 210,000. We shouldn’t be at, one, it’s China’s fault. They allowed this to happen.”

Oct. 15, 2020

“Excess mortality, we’re a winner on the excess mortality. And what we’ve done has been amazing. And we have done an amazing job. And it’s rounding the corner and we have the vaccines coming, and we have the therapies coming.”

Oct. 18, 2020

“He’ll listen to the scientists… If I listened totally to the scientists, we would right now have a country that would be in a massive depression instead — we’re like a rocket ship. Take a look at the numbers.” [Trump referring to Biden]

Oct. 19, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 220,000

Oct. 19, 2020

“People are saying whatever. Just leave us alone. They’re tired of it. People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots…Fauci is a nice guy. He’s been here for 500 years.”

Oct. 19, 2020

“They are getting tired of the pandemic, aren’t they? You turn on CNN, that’s all they cover. ‘Covid, Covid, Pandemic, Covid, Covid.’ You know why? They’re trying to talk everybody out of voting. People aren’t buying it, CNN, you dumb bastards.”

Oct. 20, 2020

Politico reports that The White House is considering slashing millions of dollars for coronavirus relief, HIV treatment, screenings for newborns and other programs in Democratic-led cities that President Donald Trump has deemed “anarchist jurisdictions.”

Oct. 22, 2020

“We are rounding the turn (on coronavirus). We are rounding the corner.”

Oct. 24, 2020

"Turn on television: ‘covid, covid, covid, covid, covid.’ A plane goes down, 500 people dead, they don’t talk about it — ‘covid, covid, covid, covid,’ “By the way, on November 4th, you won’t hear about it anymore.”

Oct. 26, 2020

“Cases up because we TEST, TEST, TEST. A Fake News Media Conspiracy. Many young people who heal very fast. 99.9%. Corrupt Media conspiracy at all time high. On November 4th., the topic will totally change. VOTE!”

Oct. 26, 2020

“We have made tremendous progress with the China Virus, but the Fake News refuses to talk about it this close to the Election. COVID, COVID, COVID is being used by them, in total coordination, in order to change our great early election numbers. Should be an election law violation!”

Oct. 27, 2020

“So they brought it down now, immunity, from life to four months. And you know now with them, you can’t watch anything else. You turn on… COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID. Well, we have a spike in cases. You ever notice, they don’t use the word death. They use the word cases, cases. Like, “Barron Trump is a case.” He has sniffles. He was sniffling. One Kleenex, that’s all he needed. One, and he was better. But he’s a case”

Oct. 27, 2020

“November 4th. On November 4th, you’ll hear, “It’s getting better. It’s getting better.” You watch. No, no, they’re doing heavy COVID because they want to scare people, and people get it.” [Trump referring to news media]

Oct. 28, 2020

“Covid, Covid, Covid is the unified chant of the Fake News Lamestream Media. They will talk about nothing else until November 4th., when the Election will be (hopefully!) over. Then the talk will be how low the death rate is, plenty of hospital rooms, & many tests of young people.”

Oct. 30, 2020

“More Testing equals more Cases. We have the best testing. Deaths WAY DOWN. Hospitals have great additional capacity! Doing much better than Europe. Therapeutics working!”

Oct. 30, 2020

Nine million Americans have now been infected by the coronavirus.

Oct. 30, 2020

“Our doctors get more money if someone dies from Covid,” and so “when in doubt choose Covid.”

Nov. 1, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 230,000

Nov. 1, 2020

“Biden wants to LOCKDOWN our Country, maybe for years. Crazy! There will be NO LOCKDOWNS. The great American Comeback is underway!!!”

Nov. 2, 2020

“Joe Biden is promising to delay the vaccine and turn America into a prison state—locking you in your home while letting far-left rioters roam free. The Biden Lockdown will mean no school, no graduations, no weddings, no Thanksgiving, no Christmas, no Fourth of July”

Nov. 2, 2020

“We have more Cases because we have more Testing!”

Nov. 9, 2020

“If Joe Biden were President, you wouldn’t have the Vaccine for another four years, nor would the @US_FDA have ever approved it so quickly. The bureaucracy would have destroyed millions of lives”

Nov. 10, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 240,000

Nov. 11, 2020

U.S. hits a record 140,000 COVID-19 cases per day

November 11, 2020

Texas hits 1 million confirmed COVID-19 cases

Nov. 18, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 250,000

Nov. 19, 2020

Last Coronavirus Task Force press briefing under the Trump Administration.

Nov. 24, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 260,000

Dec. 2, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 270,000

Dec. 7, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 280,000

Dec. 8, 2020

“Before Operation Warp Speed, the typical time [for vaccine approval] could be infinity.”

Dec. 8, 2020

Trump continues holding White House holiday parties despite guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to limit indoor gatherings and curtain travel amid the spike in virus infections. Masks are not required, according to guests.

Dec. 9, 2020

3,103 U.S. COVID-19 deaths in one day

Dec. 10, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 290,000

Dec. 14, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 300,000

Dec. 17, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 310,000

Dec. 22, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 320,000

Dec. 22, 2020

“Distribution of both vaccines is going very smoothly. Amazing how many people are being vaccinated, record numbers. Our Country, and indeed the World, will soon see the great miracle of what the Trump Administration has accomplished. They said it couldn’t be done!!!”

Dec. 25, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 330,000

Dec. 30, 2020

As recently as mid-December, the Trump administration touted an ambitious goal: 20 million COVID-19 vaccinations by the year’s end. A CDC tracker shows only about 2 million people have been vaccinated so far.

Dec. 31, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 340,000

Dec. 31, 2020

Trump tweets, “The Federal Government has distributed the vaccines to the states. Now it is up to the states to administer. Get moving!”

Dec. 31, 2020

HHS awards a contract to a private firm to review COVID-19 tests in an attempt to bypass scientists at the FDA.

January 1, 2020

U.S. surpasses 20 million confirmed COVID-19 cases

January 3, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 350,000

January 3, 2020

“Something how Dr. Fauci is revered by the LameStream Media as such a great professional, having done, they say, such an incredible job, yet he works for me and the Trump Administration, and I am in no way given any credit for my work. Gee, could this just be more Fake News?”

January 3, 2020

“The number of cases and deaths of the China Virus is far exaggerated in the United States because of @CDCgov’s ridiculous method of determination compared to other countries, many of whom report, purposely, very inaccurately and low. “When in doubt, call it Covid.” Fake News!” Fauci responds, "“The deaths are real deaths. All you need to do is go out into the trenches…”

January 3, 2020

Trump tweets, “The vaccines are being delivered to the states by the Federal Government far faster than they can be administered!”

January 4, 2020

CDC reports that 4.6 million people have been vaccinated.

January 6, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 360,000

January 6, 2020

Trump mob storms Congress. Officials reported at least 3,963 new coronavirus deaths in the US, a new single-day record.

January 9, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 370,000

January 12, 2020

HHS Secretary Alex Azar announced that the federal government would begin releasing vaccine doses that had been held in reserve for second shots, but no such reserve existed. His false announcement raised false hopes among state and local officials.

January 13, 2020

U.S. death toll passes 380,000

January 14, 2020

The Trump administration promised to have 20 million people given their first shot by the end of 2020. Two weeks later, they have administered just over 11 million.

January 15, 2020

12 million doses of vaccine administered.

January 16, 2020

U.S. death tool passes 390,000

January 18, 2020

Washington Post reports that emergency PPP loans were provided for organizations that spread misinformation about coronavirus and vaccination.

January 20, 2020

Each day in January, covid-19 killed an average of 3,100 people in the United States — one every 28 seconds.

January 20, 2021

Trump’s term in office saw over 25 million confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States, over 400,000 of which resulted in death.

President-elect Joseph R. Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris are sworn into office.

Source

The Alt-History YouTuber Whatifalthist decided to dip his toes into real history again and made a YouTube video in which he supposedly breaks down his top 11 historical misconceptions, in which he says a section entitled “7: All of Pre-Colonial Africa.” As a massive enthusiast of pre-colonial Subsaharan African history, I decided I’d take a look at this section, I thought it would be interesting to take a look, but what I saw was very disappointing.

He starts by making the claim that Africa was not a monolith and that the development of urbanized societies was not consistent throughout the continent.

Africa was simultaneously primitive and advanced. You could find places like Tanzania where 100 year ago, 60% of the land was uninhabitable due to disease, and the rest was inhabited by illiterate iron age societies.

Now, this section is true in a hyper-literal sense. However, the problem is that this statement also applied to pretty much the entire world in the pre-modern age. Every continent has large swathes of land that are either unoccupied or inhabited by peoples who could be considered “illiterate iron age societies” by Whatifalthist’s standards. In short, the presence of nonliterate societies is in no way unique to Subsaharan Africa.

Then, he posts the cursed map. I don’t even know where to begin with everything wrong with this image. Supposedly displaying levels of development (whatever that means) before colonization, the map is riddled with atrocious errors.

Maybe the worst error in the map is Somalia, which he labels in its entirety as “nomadic goat herders.” Anyone with a passing knowledge of Somali history will know how inaccurate this is. Throughout the late middle ages and early modern period, Southern Somalia was dominated by the Ajuraan sultanate, a centralized and literate state. While much of rural Ajuraan was inhabited by nomadic pastoralists, these pastoralists were subject to the rule and whims of the urban elites who ruled over the region. Mogadishu was one of the most influential ports on the Indian Ocean throughout the medieval and early modern periods. In modern Eastern-Ethiopia, the Somali Adal sultanate was another example of a literate, centralized, urban state in the Eastern horn of Africa. Ok, maybe he was only referring to Somalia in the era immediately before European colonization. Well, even then, it’s still inaccurate, as there were plenty of urbanized and literate societies in 19th and early 20th century Somalia. In fact, the Geledi sultanate during its apex was at one point even capable of extracting regular tribute payments from the Sultan of Oman. (Read about this in Kevin Shillington’s History of Africa, 2005).

He also insulting labels the regions of Nigeria and Ghana as “urban illiterate peoples.” This is especially untrue in southern Nigeria, considering that the region literally developed a unique script for writing in late antiquity that remained in use until the late medieval period. Northern Nigeria being labelled as illiterate is equally insulting. The region, which was dominated by various Hausa city-states until united by the Sokoto Caliphate, had a long-standing tradition of literacy and literary education. Despite this, Whatifalthist arbitrarily labels half the region as illiterate and the other half as “jungle farmers”, whatever that means. In modern Ghana, on the other hand, there existed a state called the Ashanti kingdom. How widespread literacy was within Ashantiland in the precolonial era is not well documented. However, during the British invasion of the empire’s capital at Kumasi, the British note that the royal palace possessed an impressive collection of foreign and domestically produced books. They then proceeded to blow it up. I’d also like to mention that he arbitrarily designates several advanced, urban, and, in some cases, literate West African states in the West African forest region (such as Oyo and Akwamu) as “jungle farmers.”

He also questionably labels the Swahili coast as “illiterate cattle herders”, and just blots out Madagascar for some reason, which was inhabited by multiple advanced, literate states prior to colonization.

Now, with the cursed map out of the way, I want to get onto the next part of the video that bothered me. Whatifalthist makes some questionable statements in the section in between, but nothing major, and actually makes some good points in pointing out that many of the larger, more centralized states in Western Africa were just as advanced as those in any other part of the world. However, he then goes on to say this:

“However, as institutions went, they were quite primitive. No African state had a strong intellectual tradition, almost all were caste societies without any real ability for social advancement. You never saw parliaments, scientific revolutions, or cultural movements that spread to the rest of the world coming out of Subsaharan Africa.”

Just about everything in this statement is incredibly wrong, so I’ll break it down one piece at a time.

“No subsaharan African state had a strong intellectual tradition”

This is grossly untrue. The most famous example of intellectual traditions in West Africa comes from the scholarly lineages of Timbuktu, but intellectual traditions in the region were far more widespread than just Timbuktu, with Kano and Gao also serving as important intellectual centers of theology, philosophy, and natural sciences.. In Ethiopia and Eritrea, there is a longstanding intellectual tradition which based itself primarily in the country’s many Christian monasteries. Because of this monastic tradition, Ethiopia has possesses some of the oldest and best preserved manuscripts of anywhere in the world.

“Almost all were caste societies without any real ability for social advancement.”

Keep in mind, this was true in pretty much every settled society until relatively recently. Even then, the concept that pre-colonial African societies were any more hierarchically rigid than their contemporaries in Europe and Asia is questionable at best. Arguably the most meritocratic civilization of antiquity, Aksum, was located in East Africa. Frumentius, the first bishop of Aksum and the first abuna of the Aksumite church, first came to Aksum as a slave. The same is true for Abraha, who was elevated from slave to royal advisor and eventually was given a generalship, which he then used to carve out his own independent kingdom in modern Yemen. These are, admittedly, extreme and unusual examples. Like in the rest of the world, if you were born in the lower classes in pre-colonial Africa, you’d probably die in the lower classes. This was not necessarily true all the time though. In the Ashanti kingdom, a common subject who acquired great amounts of wealth or showcased prowess on the battlefield could be granted the title of Obirempon (big man), by the Asantehene.

You never saw parliaments

Yes you did. Just for one example, the Ashanti kingdom possessed an institution called the Kotoko council, a council of nobles, elders, priests, and aristocrats.This institution is pretty similar to the House of Lords in Great Britain, and possessed real power, often overruling decisions made by the Asantehene (Ashanti King).

“You never saw scientific revolutions.”

I’m not sure what exactly he means by “scientific revolution”, but there were certainly numerous examples of scientific advancements made in Subsaharan Africa, some of which even had wide-ranging impacts on regions outside of the continent. The medical technique of innoculation is maybe the most well known. While inoculation techniques existed in East Asia and the Near East for a long time, the technique of smallpox inoculation was first introduced to the United States through an Akan slave from modern-day Ghana named Onesimus. This may be only one example (others exist), but it’s enough to disprove the absolute.

“Africa had no cultural movements that spread to the rest of the world.”

Because of the peculiar way it’s phrased, I’m not sure exactly what he meant by this. I assume he means that African culture has had little impact on the rest of the world. If this is indeed what he meant, it is not true. I can counter this with simply one word: music.

In the next part of the video, Whatifalthist switches gears to move away from making embarrassingly untrue statements about African societies and instead moves on to discussing colonialism and the slave trade.

“Also, another thing people forget about pre-colonial Africa is that Europeans weren’t the only colonizers. The Muslims operated the largest slave trade in history out of here. Traders operating in the Central DRC had far higher death-rates than the Europeans. The Omanis controlled the whole East Coast of Africa and the Egyptians had conquered everything down to the Congo by the Early 19th century.”

So, I looked really hard for figures on the death-rates of African slaves captured by Arabian slavers in the 19th century, and couldn’t find any reliable figures. Any scholarly census of either the transatlantic or Arab slave trades will note the unreliability of their estimates. Frankly, the statement that “the Islamic slave trade was the largest slave trade in history” sounds like something he pulled out of his ass. Based on the estimates we do have, the Arab slave trade is significantly smaller than the transatlantic slave trade even when you take into account that the latter lasted significantly longer. Regardless, is it really necessary to engage in slavery olympics? Slavery is bad no matter who does it. Now, I would have enjoyed it if the YouTuber in question actually went into more details about the tragic but interesting history of slavery in East Africa, such as the wars between the Afro-Arab slaver Tippu Tip and the Belgians in the 19th century, the history of clove plantations in the Swahili coast, etc. But, instead, he indulges in whataboutisms and dives no further.

The root of the problem with the video are its sources

At the end of each section, Whatifalthist lists his sources used on the section. Once I saw what they were, it immediately became clear to me what the problem was. His sources are “The Tree of Culture”, a book written by anthropologist Ralph Linton, and “Conquests and Cultures” by economist Thomas Sowell.

The Tree of Culture is not a book about African history, but rather an anthropological study on the origin of human cultures. To my knowledge, the book is largely considered good, if outdated (it was written in the early 50s), as Linton was a respected academic who laid out a detailed methodology. However, keep in mind, it is not a book about African history, but an anthropological study that dedicates only a few chapters to Africa. No disrespect to Linton, his work is undeniably formative in the field of anthropology. I’m sure Linton himself would not be happy if people read this book and walked away with the impression that it was remotely close to offering a full, detailed picture of African history.

Sowell’s book is similarly not a book on African history, but is better described as Sowell’s academic manifesto for his philosophical conceptions of race and culture. Ok, neat, but considering that the book only dedicates a portion of its contents to Africa and that most of that is generalities of geography and culture, not history, it’s not appropriate to cite as a source on African history.

This is ultimately the problem with the video. Instead of engaging in true research with sources on African history, Whatifalthist instead engaged in research with anthropological vagueries and filled in the historical blanks with his own preconceptions and stereotypes.

TL;DR: I did not like the video. I can’t speak for the rest of it, but the parts about Africa were really bad.

Sorry for the typo in the title

Thanks for the gold and platinum! Much appreciated.

Citations (in order of their appearance in the post):

• Cassanelli, Lee V. Pastoral Power: The Ajuraan in History and Tradition.” The Shaping of Somali Society, 1982. https://doi.org/10.9783/9781512806663-007.
• Chaudhuri, K. N. Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: an Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• Mukhtar, Mohamed Haji. “Adal Sultanate.” The Encyclopedia of Empire, 2016, 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118455074.wbeoe145.
• Luling, Virginia. Somali Sultanate: the Geledi City-State over 150 Years. London: HAAN, 2002.
• Nwosu, Maik. “In the Name of the Sign: The Nsibidi Script as the * Language and Literature of the Crossroads.” Semiotica 2010, no. 182 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.2010.061.
• Mohammed, Hassan Salah El. Lore of the Traditional Malam: Material * Culture of Literacy and Ethnography of Writing among the Hausa of Northern Nigeria, 1990.
• Lloyd, Alan. The Drums of Kumasi: the Story of the Ashanti Wars. London: Panther Book, 1965.
• Kane, Ousmane. Beyond Timbuktu: an Intellectual History of Muslim West Africa. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.
• Bausi, Alessandro. “Cataloguing Ethiopic Manuscripts: Update and Overview on Ongoing Work.” Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.csmc.* uni-hamburg.de/publications/conference-contributions/files/bausi-text.pdf.
• McCaskie, T. C. State and Society in Pre-Colonial Asante. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Brown, Thomas H. “The African Connection.” JAMA 260, no. 15, 1988.
  https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1988.03410150095037.
• Berlin, Edward A., and Edward A. Berlin. Ragtime: a Musical and Cultural History. University of California Press, 2002.
• “The Mediterranean Islamic Slave Trade out of Africa: A Tentative Census.” Slave Trades, 1500–1800, 2016, 35–70. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315243016-8.
• The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Uprooted Millions. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-trans-atlantic-slave-trade-uprooted-millions/ar-AAG3WvO.

One of the most disheartening charts I’ve seen about the current hyperpartisan political climate. We fear each other so much more.

– Source

I suppose all’s fine and dandy if you’re in news or social media and are spiritually obligated to deliver Value™ to stakeholders via those almighty engagement metrics that do nothing more than sow rancor among people who have a lot more in common than they’re led to believe. All Facebook does is hold a mirror up to society. All the news media does is report. Ethics and responsibility are for the Value™-illiterate. The only thing that matters, as the society and country you and your children live in devours itself, is making gobs of cash.

The answer to “Do the Patriots who bemoaned the purported ‘cancellation’ of Dr. Seuss know what he would’ve drawn about their party right now?” should be obvious to anyone who isn’t untethered from reality.

Sarah Churchwell examines the sordid origins of “America First” (Cached)

You know, the one where Evil Liberals partnered with Soros and Hillary and flew in 40,000 ballots (and not more) from China (or thereabouts) to Maricopa County in Arizona (and nowhere else.) So the only way to make sure the ballots are authentic is to stick them under a microscope and look for bamboo fibers because… you know… Kung-Fu Panda? Asians? Bamboo?

From an article in The Guardian:

[…] “I do think it’s somewhat of a waste of time, but it will help unhinge people,” Brakey said on Wednesday. “They’re not gonna find bamboo … If they do, I think we need to know, don’t you?”

I don’t think anyone’s getting unhinged in that party anymore, Mr. Brakey.

One of the people who spread the lie about China dumping ballots, according to Slate, was Javon Pulitzer, a treasure hunter and inventor, who is reportedly assisting with the Maricopa county audit. Though it’s not clear in what capacity Pulitzer is assisting, Brakey told reporters on Tuesday that the machines capturing the microscopic images of the ballots were linked to Pulitzer. “This guy is nuts,” he said. “He’s a fraudster … It’s ridiculous that we’re doing some of this.”

Then why do you keep doing it?

The county has hired a firm called “Cyber Ninjas” to perform the audit. Because it’s the late 90’s and we just allow teenagers to give ‘cool’ names to companies. Like most entities in the World of Orange, they’re exceedingly good at their job, just like all the top-notch attorneys on the Elite Strike-Force Team 💯

[Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug] Logan’s “Stop the Steal” antics extend beyond social media. He is listed as an expert witness in a lawsuit alleging voter fraud in Michigan. Logan was also the author of a document called “Election Fraud Facts & Details” that Sidney Powell, the conservative attorney who is now embroiled in a defamation lawsuit concerning her election conspiracy theories, shared on her website. In the document, he props up the Venezuela narrative and a similarly absurd and debunked theory regarding Chinese investment in the voting machine manufacturer Dominion.

[…] Election experts noted that the company has already made rookie mistakes. For instance, Arizona Republic reporter Jen Fifield spotted auditors using blue pens, which is not best practice since there is a risk of altering the vote on a ballot. The state’s own election process manual prohibits anything but red pens from being used. When Fifield brought the issue up with Logan, she says he was unaware that the blue ink could be a problem and seemed unsure overall about the correct procedure. A judge later ordered the removal of all black and blue pens from the facility where the recount is taking place. The Brennan Center for Justice, a legal think tank associated with New York University, also sent a letter to the Department of Justice last week alleging that Cyber Ninjas has not been following basic security practices like locking doors to the facility holding the ballots and preventing unauthorized individuals from entering.

For more ineptitude, here’s an account from Jennifer Morrell at The Washington Post (cached)

I was stunned to see spinning conveyor wheels, whizzing hundreds of ballots past “counters,” who struggled to mark, on a tally sheet, each voter’s selection for the presidential and Senate races. They had only a few seconds to record what they saw. Occasionally, I saw a counter look up, realize they missed a ballot and then grab the wheel to stop it. This process sets them up to make so many mistakes, I kept thinking. Humans are terrible at tedious, repetitive tasks; we’re especially bad at counting. That’s why, in all the other audits I’ve seen, bipartisan teams follow a tallying method that allows for careful review and inspection of each ballot, followed by a verification process. I’d never seen an audit use contraptions to speed up the process.

Speed doesn’t necessarily pose a problem if the audit has a process for catching and correcting mistakes. But it didn’t. Each table had three volunteers tallying the ballots, and their tally sheets were considered “done” as long as two of the three tallies matched, and the third was off by no more than two ballots. The volunteers only recounted if their tally sheets had three or more errors — a threshold they stuck to, no matter how many ballots a stack contained, whether it was 50 or 100. This allowed for a shocking amount of error. Some table managers told the counters to go back and recount when there were too many errors; other table managers just instructed the counters to fix their “math mistakes.” At no point did anyone track how many ballots they were processing at their station, to ensure that none got added or lost during handling.

I also observed other auditors working on a “forensic paper audit,” flagging ballots as “suspicious” for a variety of reasons. One was presidential selection: If someone thought the voter’s choice looked as though it was marked by a machine, they flagged it as “anomalous.” Another was “missing security markers.” (It’s virtually impossible for a ballot to be missing its security markers, since voting equipment is designed to reject ballots without them.) The third was paper weight — the forensics tables had scales for weighing ballots, though I never saw anyone use them — and texture. Volunteers scrutinized ballots for, of all things, bamboo fibers. Only later, after the shift, did I learn that this was connected to a conspiracy theory that fake ballots had been flown in from South Korea.

The fourth reason was folding. The auditors reasoned that only absentee voters would fold their ballots; an in-person, Election Day voter would take a flat ballot, mark it in the booth and submit it, perfectly pristine. I almost had to laugh: In my experience, voters will fold ballots every which way, no matter where they vote or what the ballot instructs them to do. Chalk it up to privacy concerns or individual quirks — but no experienced elections official would call that suspicious.

[…] Their equipment worried me more than their wild theorizing. At the forensics tables, auditors took a photo of each ballot using a camera suspended by a frame, then passed the ballot to someone operating a lightbox with four microscope cameras attached. This was a huge deviation from the norm. Usually, all equipment that election officials use to handle a ballot — from creating to scanning to tallying it — has been federally tested and certified; often, states will conduct further tests before their jurisdictions accept the machines. It jarred me to see volunteers using this untested, uncertified equipment on ballots, claiming that the images would be used at some point in the future for an electronic re-tally.

[…] What I saw in Arizona shook me. If the process wraps up and Cyber Ninjas puts together some kind of report, that report will almost certainly claim that there were issues with Maricopa County’s ballots. After all, Cyber Ninjas chief executive Doug Logan has publicly voiced his wild conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. But the real problem is the so-called audit itself.

The Best People, folks ♥️

[…] I think late 50’s he was asked once “Why are you wasting your time with CND demonstrations when you could be working on logic and philosophy and doing something of lasting significance?” And his answer wasn’t bad. He said “If I’m not out there demonstrating, there won’t be anyone around to read the logic and philosophy.” And that’s a pretty good response.

“A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.”

Can’t y’all just take a joke?

From 2016 but still very relevant apropos conservatism and isolationism.

I have accepted that Shitkraken won’t end for a while.

Giuliani’s attorney, son, and allies like convicted former New York Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik have urged Trump aides to dip into his massive war chest to help cover the former New York City mayor’s mounting lawyer bills after Giuliani’s home was raided by the FBI last week […]

The pleas from Giuliani’s supporters come after Trump refused to pay his former lawyer for his work on his election legal challenges. Trump “balked” at paying Giuliani after his associate sent a bill for $20,000 for a day of his work and told aides he did not want Giuliani to receive “any payment,” according to the report. Trump ultimately agreed to reimburse Giuliani $200,000 for expenses but has “stridently refused to pay” Giuliani’s fees.

The notoriously stingy former president bombarded supporters with fundraising appeals after his election loss, raising some $250 million to ostensibly fund his legal battle. But Trump spent a tiny fraction on actual legal costs as his many court challenges were quickly rejected by dozens of federal judges, including ones he appointed. Now, Giuliani’s allies are asking Trump to use the quarter-billion he raised with the Republican National Committee to help pay Giuliani’s costs in the federal probe and defamation lawsuits.

In the Yam’s defense, I wouldn’t want to pay for a 1.5% success rate either. In the Strike-Force Leader’s defense, I don’t think he could’ve seen this coming.

I didn’t want to post anything more about this seemingly interminable saga of ineptitude and batshittery. But I am a collector of various things. And collectors value completeness. So here we go.

An Ex-Member of the “Elite Strike-Force Team” says “reasonable people” wouldn’t really believe her bullshit so please don’t sue her for a billion and change:

Pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell asked a federal court to dismiss a roughly $1.3 billion defamation suit filed against her by Dominion Voting Systems, arguing that her claims the company’s voting machines rigged the election for Joe Biden represented her opinion, not statements of fact.

[…] In its Monday motion, Ms. Powell’s legal team argued that “reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process."

The Fearless Leader of the verysame “Elite Strike-Force Team” is in some trouble:

Federal agents executed search warrants Wednesday at the Manhattan apartment and office of Rudy Giuliani, his attorney said, advancing a criminal investigation by federal prosecutors that has been underway for more than two years.

Giuliani […] has been the focus of an investigation concerning his activities in Ukraine, including whether he conducted illegal lobbying for Ukrainian officials while he pursued an investigation linked to Trump’s primary political rival, President Joe Biden, CNN has reported.

[…] Giuliani is also facing other legal exposure for his role in the 2020 election. The election technology company Dominon sued Giuliani in January for defamation after he spread baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud on his podcast and during TV appearances.

[…] Guiliani is also likely to face scrutiny from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is investigating Trump’s efforts to influence Georgia’s election results. […] One area Willis is exploring: whether Giuliani may have violated the law by making false statements about voting in Georgia in front of the state legislature, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

As this article notes: The man hadn’t practised law since 1992, “basically he’s a novice” at state election law, and is considered a “gift to legal ethics professors that just keeps on giving” because “Charging astronomical rates for work–especially work for which the attorney does not have deep expertise or ability—is an ethics violation.” Probably a good thing, then, that he most likely hasn’t been paid for his expertise.

The Best People ♥️

Rudy Giuliani’s press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, between a dildo store and a crematorium, is still appropriate because Rudy is somewhere between fucked and dead.

Because the only thing that matters is delivering Value to shareholders. (cached)

Incidentally, and to the “huh” of many Value-illiterate people, defending totalitarian governments is exactly how one gives “people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”

And as a staunch Free Market Conservative, I don’t really worry about sales (cached). May the market do its thing (cached), just like St. Reagan said it would.

That’s because it was never a hoax. Why would Trump do any of the following if he wasn’t a Russian asset?

• Trump praised Putin constantly, called him a “strong leader”, has peddled statements like “he’s done a really great job outsmarting our country” (source)

• The Trump campaign worked behind the scenes to make sure the 2016 Republican platform won’t call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces, contradicting the view of almost all Republican foreign policy leaders in Washington (source)

• Trump dismissed and cast doubt about Russian hacking, particularly when the U.S determined that Russia hacked the DNC in 2016, while ironically enough, he encouraged Russian cyber attacks on national TV saying, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” (source)

• When addressing Russian election interference and cyber attacks, Trump proclaimed “I don’t see any reason why it would be Russia” after speaking directly with Putin, defending Russia and trusting Putin over our own intelligence agencies. Later he “corrected” himself, claiming that he meant to say “wouldn’t” instead of would (source)

• Trump suggested the U.S. work directly with Russia on cybersecurity (source)

• Almost directly after the 2016 election, Trump sought to weaken U.S. sanctions on Russia, while he was even open to lifting sanctions (source)

• Trump dismissed the notion that Putin was a “killer”, downplaying the idea that Putin resorts to using violence and oppressive tactics to crush political opponents. He defended Putin, rationalizing his ruthless despotism in the process, declaring, “There are a lot of killers. Do you think our country is so innocent?” (source)

• Trump shared highly classified U.S. intelligence with Russian officials in the Oval Office in 2017 (source)

• Trump repeated Kremlin talking points related to the Russian annexation of Crimea, reiterating things like, “The people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were.” (source)

• Trump constantly attacked NATO, aligning himself with Putin (source)

• Trump thanked Putin for expelling hundreds of U.S. diplomats as a retaliation for sanctions (source)

• Trump imposed tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum while Republicans were working on a deal with Oleg Deripaska, one of Putin’s most trusted oligarchs, on an aluminum plant in Kentucky (source)

• According to congressional testimony, Trump declined to publicly condemn a Russian attack against Ukrainian military vessels in November 2018, even though the State Department prepared a statement for him (source)

• Trump congratulated and gave legitimacy to Putin’s re election win in 2018, a victory said to “lack genuine competition” (source)

• Sergei Skripal, an ex Russian spy that defected to the UK, was poisoned. Sanctions were announced, Trump attempted to rescind them, while asserting that the U.S. was being “too tough on Putin” (source)

• When congress passed new sanctions against Russia in 2017, Trump was very reluctant to signing the bill, and probably wouldn’t have signed it if the bill didn’t pass with veto-proof majorities in both houses (source)

• In 2017 it was reported that Trump was considering returning spy bases to Russia (source)

• Trump praised and highlighted pro-Russian leaders in Europe. Far right European leaders with close ties to Putin. He even met a Kremlin ally at the Whitehouse (source)

• When Trump withdrew troops from Syria, it gave Russia and Putin an opportunity to control abandoned U.S. outposts and checkpoints (source)

• Trump pushed a conspiracy that it was Ukraine that hacked the DNC and had a physical server stashed away in Ukraine. He claimed the server was given to a Ukrainian based company (it was a US based company founded by a Russian who has been in the US for quite a long time) and it would prove that Ukraine was behind the DNC hack and not Russia. (source)

• Trump froze U.S. aide for Ukraine in it’s war against Russian proxies. He repeated Russian disinformation surrounding Ukraine as well (source)

• Trump withdrew from the Open Skies Treaty in 2020 allowing for unarmed aircraft to use surveillance equipment over territories that were previously regulated (source)

• Trump made requests to bring Russia back into the G7 and invited Putin to the 2020 G7 summit (source)

Though capitalism has had a longer lease of life than some of us would’ve predicted or that many of our ancestors of the socialist movement did predict or allow, it still produces the fax machine and the microchip and still able to lower its costs and still able to flatten its distribution curve very well. It’s central contradiction remains the same; It produces publicly, it produces socially, it conscripts and it mobilizes and educates whole new work forces of people, it has an enormous transforming liberating effect in that respect but it appropriates privately. The resources and the natural abilities are held in common, the earth belongs to us all. You can’t buy your child a place at a school with better ozone. You can’t pretend that the world is other than what it is which is one and human and natural and in common. Though capitalism must do that because it must make us all work until the point when the social product is to be shared. When suddenly the appropriation is private and suddenly Donald Trump outvotes any congressman you can name and anyone with a vote because of the ownership of capital and its that effect, that annexation of what we all do and must do — the influence of labor and intelligence and creativity on nature; the same air, the same water that we must breathe and drink. That means that we may not have long in which to make this critique of the system sing again and relevant again and incisive again.

Matt Rowan is a family man, a Christian, and a former youth pastor (so we’re off to a fantastic start already). At a high school basketball game, this pillar of the community called children “f****** n******s” for that grave sin of actually kneeling during the national anthem.

On the video, Rowan is heard to refer to the players as “f****** n******.” He added, "I hope Norman gets their ass kicked,” and then "I hope they lose. C’mon Midwest City. They’re gonna kneel like that? Hell no.”

Now in what has to be the most shameless excuse for reprehensible behaviour I’ve read to date, he blames his MAGA¹ outburst on his blood sugar!

I will state that I suffer Type 1 Diabetes, and during the game, my sugar was spiking. While not excusing my remarks, it is not unusual when my sugar spikes that I become disoriented and often say things that are not appropriate, as well as hurtful. I do not believe that I would have made such horrible statements absent my sugar spiking.

He helpfully adds:

While the comments I made would certainly seem to indicate that I am racist, I am not, I have never considered myself to be racist, and in short cannot explain why I made these comments.

I think most reasonable people would have a simple one-word explanation. And to quote Conservative Hannibal Lecter: “While the body parts in the fridge would certainly seem to indicate that I am a psychopathic murderer, I have never considered myself to be one.”

No word has been issued as far as repercussions for the Hulbert employee.

In Rowan’s statement, he said he believed the microphone to be off, but “that is no excuse; such comments should have never been uttered.”

Like almost all this-is-really-not-who-I-am people, he’s only sorry he got caught.

The Supreme Court disposed of the last of former President Donald Trump’s challenges to state election procedures Monday, rejecting his appeal of lower court rulings that upheld Wisconsin’s handling of mail-in ballots.

The court announced the rejection without comment in a one-line order, which is its normal practice.

Trump and his allies had a uniformly unsuccessful record before the Supreme Court in their effort to overturn the presidential election results in states won by Joe Biden.

This was a wild ride. I really hope the “Elite Strike Force” team got paid to be the winners they are 🥇 You know, from $8 million of the $250 million that was raised for the purpose.

SOCIALIST: late capitalism has created a moral rot that pervades our entire society

NEOLIBERAL: but imagine if we monetized the rot

Standing on the Capitol steps on Jan. 6, Richard Michetti allegedly took a break from the rioting to argue with his ex-girlfriend over text message. After sending photos and videos of the mob and boasting how he had avoided tear gas, Michetti parroted Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud.

“If you can’t see the election was stolen you’re a moron,” Michetti wrote in a text to the woman, according to court documents.

The next day, the woman he had insulted promptly told the FBI that her ex was at the Capitol, handing over to law enforcement the string of texts, photos and videos he had sent to her.

[…] The Trump supporter told his former partner that while his eyes were burning, he and the thousands there were doing the right thing to “stop the vote it’s fraud this is our country.”

[…] “This is tyranny,” he texted her later that evening. “They … told us ‘we rigged the election and there’s nuthin you can do about it’ what do you think should be done?”

And who bears any responsibility for this man’s delusion? It certainly isn’t the person who incited the riots. Or any of the Media czars who made gobs of money fomenting discord for those almighty engagement metrics.

Letters won’t do anything. Regulation is necessary (thanks again, St. Reagan.)

::Deadly pandemic rages::

Texas: “Let’s mismanage energy so thoroughly that our citizens are compelled to congregate en masse in heating centers designed to keep warm air and breath inside.” Here’s the problem with deregulation and privatization of public services.

The primary directive of a government is to serve and protect its citizens

The primary directive of a corporation is to make a buck.

When you give the duties of the former to the latter, failure ensues. Conservatives like to talk about running governments like businesses.

This is meant to drum up images of high corporate efficiency.

But a government that runs like a corporation is a failed government. A corporation, tasked with generating both higher profit and greater consumer satisfaction will work towards satisfaction ONLY insofar as it doesn’t impede higher profits.

If it’s one or the other, it will choose profit

This is a corporation doing what it is supposed to do. Theoretically the government’s choice should be the opposite.

It should work toward caring for people primarily, and if it is capable of recouping or exceeding its own costs then great.

But if public safety is at risk, money should be a secondary concern at best. In short, the govt model is “We’ll take care of you at any cost”

while the corporate model is “We’ll take care of you as long as it doesn’t cost us too much”

It’s clear why it’s dangerous to mix up these mandates.

Cause then people freeze to death over profit. It is understandable why government frequently needs to enlist corporations to provide specialized needs that the government can’t reasonably specialize in.

But that’s different than just ceding the whole thing to corporations and providing minimal regulation and oversight. It makes sense for instance that the government, without the equipment and resources to develop and mass produce vaccines, leans on corporations that already have the capacity.

But you don’t replace the Department of Health with Pfizer. Corporations are hostile to the things that citizens need from government:

• Job security
• Health care
• Living wages
• Civil rights
• Equal access

They are hostile because those things impede maximizing profit. This is the reason that some of the most employee-benficial employment environments are within government.

All those equity-increasing initiatives that corporations have to be arm-twisted to adopt, like anti-discrimination policies, government just has to do.
If someone promises they’re gonna run a State like a business, they’re saying that they will prioritize making money over the needs of the citizenry.

They are saying they will reconstruct government to cut every corner, pinch every penny and deprive people of costly services
Texas decided that corporations should be responsible for civic infrastructure and now people are literally freezing to death in their homes…

The poor people of course.

The rich people are fine. Because they have money and that’s how capitalism works.

Just not government. A big piece of the failure to properly upgrade and protect critical energy equipment from extreme weather was that nobody wanted to take on a costly rehab that might jeopardize their competition with other companies and lose money and market share. So when the choice was between

• “Ensure that citizens are safe, powered and warm”
• And “Make sure Company X doesn’t beat us”

Guess which won?

So now we have a state which is not only shamefully and woefully unprepared for the kind of extreme weather that their own denial of climate change ensures will only increase…

But whose only option now is to rely on a stopgap that accelerates a deadly pandemic. IF as discussed earlier, a government needs to rely on corporations to fill gaps in critical public resources, then it’s IMPERATIVE that those corporations be compelled to operate under the governmental mandate and not the corporate one.

Which is why strong regulation is key.

It’s important to state though, particularly since our current economic structure has pushed that “there is no such thing as society”.

That might sound insane, but it is not hyperbolic. In 1987, Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the UK, said that “There is no such thing as society. There is [a] living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.”

It was supposed to be on the people: they look to themselves, they help their family and their neighbor. Aid is individualized, then can be reciprocated. But, at the same time as “individuals” were supposed to be stepping up, Thatcher’s policies were stepping on them, especially the most vulnerable. This all making it harder to even look to oneself. Is it on the child to look to oneself? The child whose development was stunted by environmental pollution exacerbated by a history of systemic factors?

That has become one of Thatcher’s most famous quotes, this rejection of society in favor of individualism, a backbone of ideology that drove her move towards deregulating the British economy, towards privatizing the British services, towards turning the commons to the few, towards “tough to swallow” austerity measures. Meanwhile, today, Republicans meet with Biden to “compromise” by proposing relief 1/3 the size of the Democrats proposal (which is arguably lower than needed as is). The ever fading in, fading out, debt concerns rising again. Austerity does not work, but it is slow to die. An idea slow to die, but fast to kill.

Is it any surprise then that Thatcher turned on unions as well? They are not individuals, they are society, they are collectives. That she would work to disband the unions in the name of “economic growth”. A “growth” that she handed to the individuals - no not those individuals that needs it, but those at the top. Inequality took off in the 1980s under Thatcher, much like it did in the US under her buddy Ronald Reagan. No surprise. They both used economic theory crafted by the same bundle of Neoliberal economists: Friedman, Stigler, Hayek, Buchanan, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_the_Universe_(book)

A week after Thatcher won, Milton Friedman sent a letter to her saying “The battle has now begun. We must win.” Friedman would be an adviser to both Thatcher and Reagan, pushing his economic view of “freeing the individual”. Out of the tax cuts, the deregulation, the privatization, there was to arise the “free” market. A market that was never free up to that point, and has not been free since. Just transformed. What “individual” was freed?

Since then, there has only been a growth in the Precariat - a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, which means existing without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare.

The promise didn’t deliver, except to those that knew they would be made richer. They all knew the rich would get richer. That’s why the basis was “trickle down”. Sure they would get rich, but it would eventually come down. It didn’t. Even in Thatcher’s own terms of “saving the economy”, it did not deliver..

Now, we are dealing with the fallout of that, the precarity of a society that denies itself. The failings of which, whether in Brexit or in Trump, were made material.

See also. He was 73 years old, she was 17, and this was in 2019, when nobody had given a shit about Time’s Person of the Year for a while.

As of the 4^th of February 2021, and under its Governor’s wise, prescient, expert and data-driven leadership, Iowa ranks 47^th in the nation for the number of vaccines administered 💯

Iowa has received 446,825 doses of vaccine and has administered 266,777 doses, or just under 60% of vaccines received, the CDC reported Thursday. The state has the sixth-lowest rate of administered vaccine per capita in the nation.

“We’re averaging about 60% in getting the vaccines administered and that’s not where we need to be,” Reynolds said. “We want to do better. We know we can do better.”

We certainly can. The number of COVID-related deaths in Iowa stood at 5,033 as of this date. The very next day, our fearless Governor signed a Public Health Disaster proclamation that, compared to its predecessor, ended mask mandates and removed all limits on public gatherings.

In time for the Super Bowl, of course.

All of these relaxations at this stage of the pandemic make about as much sense as wearing underwear constructed out of nails and thumbtacks. If anything, Iowa should be enhancing precautions during the next several weeks, as long as the colder temperatures and drier air may be driving greater transmission of the virus. What is the scientific justification for what Reynolds has declared in the emergency declaration? It’s unclear. Seems like someone may owe Iowa an explanation.

Other the the usual bullshit conservative pabulum about freedom and small businesses and bootstraps and moochers and handouts, I don’t expect any explanation that makes sense.

🇺🇸: We the Peope of the Unites States…

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿: 🤣

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

I find even many people who don’t vote Republican and don’t see themselves as conservatives use this type of response when discussing programs like Affirmative Action. They see themselves as arguing for the “meritocracy”, yet don’t recognize how fraudulent the idea of the US as a meritocracy is.

To keep with the Affirmative Action example, since it is one of the most prominent, they tend to get tons wrong about affirmative action, what it actually does for minorities, and the large amounts of “unspoken” affirmative action that exists for the wealthy and alumni (both of which are more likely to be white due to racial wealth gaps and the historical legacy of admissions):

At 38 colleges in America, including five in the Ivy League – Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Penn and Brown – more students came from the top 1 percent of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60 percent.

Roughly one in four of the richest students attend an elite college – universities that typically cluster toward the top of annual rankings. In contrast, less than one-half of 1 percent of children from the bottom fifth of American families attend an elite college; less than half attend any college at all.

At elite colleges, the share of students from the bottom 40 percent has remained mostly flat for a decade. Access to top colleges has not changed much, at least when measured in quintiles. (The poor have gotten poorer over that time, and the very rich have gotten richer.)

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/upshot/some-colleges-have-more-students-from-the-top-1-percent-than-the-bottom-60.htm

The children of the rich and famous received special treatment, as did the children of alumni. If your parent or grandparent had gone to the university, your admission chances were greatly enhanced. The thought was a family’s loyalty to the institution should be rewarded even though it created unfairness for first-generation college students. Ultimately, there would be a book by Daniel Golden entitled “The Price of Admission” that explained how Brown and other Ivies had risen to prominence in part based on “affirmative action” for wealthy donors and famous celebrities.

Documents unsealed during that litigation showed how Harvard privileged the applications of the wealthy, donors, legacies (that is, alumni offspring), and faculty children. As an example, the admission rate for legacies was 33.6 percent, compared to 5.9 percent for non-alumni applicants.

Under oath, the Harvard dean of admissions was forced to explain emails he had sent “suggesting special consideration for the offspring of big donors, those who have ‘already committed to a building’ or have ‘an art collection which could conceivably come our way.’”

At Brown, I saw similar practices firsthand. When the children of prominent people came to campus for admissions tours, the development office would call me and other faculty members to set up individual meetings with them. On many occasions, I met the children of famous politicians and media celebrities who wanted their son or daughter to get into Brown. I talked with them about the university, and sometimes wrote letters on their behalf describing the meeting. It was standard operating procedure at the university as well as other elite institutions to provide special treatment for offspring of the prominent and well heeled.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2019/03/15/inside-the-ivy-league-college-admissions-process/

Last year’s survey of college admissions directors by Inside Higher Ed found that 42 percent of admissions directors at private colleges and universities said legacy status is a factor in admissions decisions at their institutions. The figure at public institutions is only 6 percent.

https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2019/04/22/study-shows-significant-impact-legacy-status-admissions-and-applicants

A new study notes that in the six admissions cycles between 2014 and 2019, 43% of white students admitted to Harvard were either legacies, recruited athletes, children of faculty and staff, or students on the Dean’s Interest List—a list of applicants whose relatives have donated to Harvard, the existence of which only became public knowledge in 2018. By contrast, no more than 16% of admitted students who were African-American, Asian-American, or Hispanic fell into one of those favored categories.

The Wall Street Journal reports that over the past five years, Princeton University admitted 30% of its legacy applicants, compared to 7% of the general applicant pool, while the acceptance rate for legacies at the University of Notre Dame, Georgetown University, and the University of Virginia is roughly double the rate for the overall applicant pool.

Since Ivy League schools were overwhelmingly white for the bulk of their histories, giving special status to the descendants of previous attendees would seem to perpetuate an unjust history of discrimination. (Indeed, legacy admissions policies were invented to justify discrimination against Jewish students at elite schools.)

https://qz.com/1713033/at-harvard-43-percent-of-white-students-are-legacies-or-athletes/

Meanwhile, the competiveness of these institutions has greatly increased over the past few decades

What race is most likely to have legacy to Ivy League universities? Racial wealth gaps? And racial income gaps? All this not even getting into the indirect benefits, such as better schools, repercussions of a racists justice system faced disproportionately by other racial groups, higher places on the racial wealth and income trends leading to more resources for test prep, the effects of poverty on development, etc.

Racial affirmative action and “racist unmeritocratic admissions” is a beautiful issue to tactically push as a wedge, yet there are more Ivy Leaguers from the top 1% than bottom 60% - as if the portion of smart kids in the bottom 60% is that drastically lower.

In face of that, some argue that affirmative action should just be income or wealth based (which should be included), but when there has been decades of de jure and de facto racial segregation creating living conditions, it becomes necessary to take into account the historical, and current, racial structures.

Poor whites tend to live in more affluent neighborhoods than do middle- class blacks and Latinos, a situation that leaves those minorities more likely to contend with weaker schools, higher crime and greater social problems, according to a new study.

The new research by scholars at the Stanford Graduate School of Education found that the gap separating black and Hispanic neighborhoods from white ones persists up and down the income ladder. A black household with an annual income of $50,000 lives on average in a neighborhood where the median income is under $43,000. But whites with the same income live in neighborhoods where the median income is almost $53,000—about 25 percent higher.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/24/poor-whites-live-in-richer-neighborhoods-than-middle-class-blacks-and-latinos/

A recent, large study examining the effects of California’s ban on racial affirmative action for public schools found that the ban hurt Black and Hispanic students quite badly, while providing relatively little benefit to White and Asian-American students:

A comprehensive study released Friday finds that by nearly every measure, the ban has harmed Black and Hispanic students, decreasing their number in the University of California system while reducing their odds of finishing college, going to graduate school and earning a high salary. At the same time, the policy didn’t appear to greatly benefit the white and Asian-American students who took their place.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/upshot/00up-affirmative-action-california-study.html

This isn’t to say the current affirmative action is perfect: for example, American Hmong and Chinese applicants both get treated as “Asian”, despite having different historical background in America and the average test scores and wealth differing dramatically between groups. As well as other inequalities between different Asian ethnicities. But, there are strong reasons for programs that recognize past discrimination and try to level overall playing fields for the future generations.

Given the racial inequalities in the US, the playing field is not equal, and if you treat everyone as equal, when some have significant advantages (on average) for their educational development, then all you do is strengthen the future divide by rewarding the current divide.

I don’t think I’ve enjoyed an article’s title this much in a while.

Here is a list of harmful nonsense Pai and his FCC did over the last four years:

• Killed net neutrality
• Approved T-Mobile / Sprint merger
• Repeatedly released reports that claimed U.S. broadband is fine
• Defended murder of net neutrality in court
• Flubbed Puerto Rico hurricane disaster response
• Slow-walked and obstructed investigation into telecom company sale of your location data
• Said FTC would protect net neutrality (it didn’t, and couldn’t)
• Falsely claimed killing net neutrality was good for broadband access (it wasn’t)
• Refused to brief Congress about telecom companies’ sale of their customers’ phone location data
• Helped Comcast and other major telecom companies in their pursuit of monopolistic power
• Oversaw America’s falling rank in an annual “Internet Freedom” index
• Allowed Verizon to throttle California firefighters’ data while they were fighting unprecedented wildfires
• Invented a DDoS attack that shut down the FCC’s net neutrality comment system
• Lied to public about that fake DDoS attack that shut down the agency’s net neutrality comment system
• Lied to Congress about that fake DDoS attack
• Didn’t detect that dead people were leaving comments on net neutrality comment system
• Refused to change the definition of ‘broadband’
• Demanded $200 to release emails about his giant mug
• Allowed scammers to submit fake comments about net neutrality under the names of two sitting senators
• Did that dumbass Harlem Shake thing with a pizzagate conspiracy theorist
• Became a rubber stamp for Sinclair Media and
• Tried to kill a broadband assistance program that subsidized internet connections for the economically unstable and poor
• Got a literal gun from the NRA for his “courage” in killing net neutrality
• Was investigated by his own agency for alleged corruption as he pushed to dismantle media consolidation rules
• Published report claiming broadband market was magically fixed by repealing net neutrality
• Ignored 22 million comments supporting net neutrality
• Tried to reclassify cell phone data service as “broadband internet”
• Allowed phone call rates for incarcerated people to skyrocket

Here are 150 articles Motherboard wrote about Pai during his tenure.

and:

Those 25Mbps / 3Mbps speeds aren’t even minimums, by the way, because the Annual Broadband Report isn’t something meant to be enforced. It’s a benchmark by which the FCC determines whether it’s doing its job of helping to close the digital divide — where as many as 1 in 3 US households don’t have broadband internet access at all. Currently, if a single ISP claims it can deliver a single 25Mbps down / 3Mbps up internet connection anywhere in your entire census block, much less your home, the FCC considers its job done. Oh, and the FCC doesn’t even audit those numbers! It’s a “fox guarding the henhouse” kind of thing.

The 107-page lawsuit […] accuses Mr. Giuliani of carrying out “a viral disinformation campaign about Dominion” made up of “demonstrably false” allegations, in part to enrich himself through legal fees and his podcast.

You don’t say.

The suit […] is based on more than 50 statements Mr. Giuliani made at legislative hearings, on Twitter, on his podcast and in the conservative news media, where he spun a fictitious narrative of a plot by one of the biggest voting machine manufacturers in the country to flip votes to President Biden.

[…] “Dominion was not founded in Venezuela to fix elections for Hugo Chávez,” the suit says. “It was founded in 2002 in John Poulos’s basement in Toronto to help blind people vote on paper ballots.” The suit later adds that the headquarters for the company’s United States subsidiary is in Denver.

[…] Laying out a timeline of Mr. Giuliani’s comments about Dominion on Twitter, his podcast and Fox News, the company notes that Mr. Giuliani avoided mentioning Dominion in court, where he could have faced legal ramifications for falsehoods. “Notably, not a single one of the three complaints signed and filed by Giuliani and other attorneys for the Trump Campaign in the Pennsylvania action contained any allegations about Dominion,” the lawsuit says.

Shocked.jpg. See also.

It would appear that my collection of batshittery is far from complete.

“Gondor has no king,” the lawsuit states, a footnote providing an explanation of the woeful fate of Tolkien’s entirely imaginary land populated by dragons, wizards, hobbits and elves, all threatened by a baleful Dark Lord backed up by an army of orcs and with famously little time for due democratic process.

The suit explains how Gondor’s throne was empty and its rightful kings in exile, presumably positing the idea that Trump is the true king of America – a land happily monarch-free since 1776.

“This analogy is applicable since there is now in Washington DC a group of individuals calling themselves the president, vice-president and Congress who have no rightful claim to govern the American people,” the case states.

It adds: “Since only the rightful king could sit on the throne of Gondor, a steward was appointed to manage Gondor until the return of the King, known as ‘Aragorn’, occurred at the end of the story.”

The lawsuit then suggests that America’s version of the stewards of Gondor should be selected from among – surprise, surprise – Trump’s cabinet members, who should run the country.

Nope. Not delusional at all.

and

By Jace Avery

Here’s to a Malarkey-Free America 🇺🇸🍦😎 Things won’t magically start getting better. He isn’t perfect. But he certainly is a decent human being, if only because he isn’t malevolent narcissism incarnate.

And unless your career depends on democratic dysfunction and systemic ineptitude, cruelty, and dishonesty that sow and sustain rancour¹, you at least ought to be relieved you won’t have to say “God what the fuck did he do now?” with the exhausting and dismaying frequency you did over the past four (THOUSAND) years. That’s something.

🙏♥️🇺🇸

Wait, is Bernie is wearing the same jacket from his meme at the inauguration?

---

---

The pose. The mittens. The social distance.

Bernie dressed like the inauguration is on his to do list today but ain’t his whole day.

---

And about those mittens:

Bernie’s mittens are made by Jen Ellis, a teacher from Essex Junction, Vt. She gave them to him 2+ years ago and was surprised when he began wearing them on the campaign trail. They are made from repurposed wool sweaters and lined with fleece made from recycled plastic bottles.

A little more backstory:

Jen Ellis, a teacher from Essex Junction, made the mittens and gave them to Sanders. She used repurposed wool from sweaters and lined them with fleece. She generally sells mittens at craft fairs or gives them to friends. Sanders’ daughter-in-law, Liza Driscoll, runs Ellis’ daughter’s daycare, so one holiday season, Ellis made mittens for all the teachers — plus Bernie.

“I just put in a little note that was like, ‘I believe in you, I’ve always believed in you and I hope you run again,’” Ellis said. “And now he is running again, and he apparently is wearing the mittens that I made for him!”

And finally (via KP):

This is the best one I’ve seen so far (via JK):

There’s also a collection (via CK) and another called “The approximate size of various ocean animals with a Bernie for scale” (via Deepu), and a Zillow listing.

• Until all votes are counted.
• Until all votes are recounted.
• Until all votes are recounted by hand.
• Until the lawsuits are filed.
• Until the lawsuits are appealed at the State Supreme Courts.
• Until the lawsuits are appealed at the Supreme Court.
• Until the states certify the results.
• Until the electors vote.
• Until the electors maybe vote faithlessly.
• Until the Electoral College confirms the winner
• Until the Vice President maybe halts the certification process.
• Until the Vice President certifies the winner in a pro forma ceremony.
• Until we maybe get our way via a terrorist insurrection.
• Until the winner of the election is sworn in on the 20^th.

And it won’t matter after that because, proof be damned, it was a massive fraud perpetrated upon us.

“These things aren’t panning out,” Barr told the president, standing beside his chief of staff Will Levi. “The stuff that these people are filling your ear with just isn’t true.” Barr explained that if Trump wanted to contest the election results, the president’s internal campaign lawyers would have to do it.

The Justice Department, he continued, had looked at the major fraud allegations that Trump’s lawyers had leveled. “It’s just bullshit,” Barr told the president. Cipollone backed up Barr by saying the DOJ was investigating these claims.

Trump pointed at the TV and asked if Barr had been watching the hearing. Barr said he hadn’t. “Maybe you should,” the president said. Barr reiterated that the Justice Department was not ignoring the allegations, but that Trump’s outside lawyers were doing a terrible job.

“I’m a pretty informed legal observer and I can’t fucking figure out what the theory is here,” he added. “It’s just scattershot. It’s all over the hill and gone.”

“Maybe,” Trump said. “Maybe.”

I’m always curious what exactly Conservatives mean when they say they “Love America” because you hate most of the people who live here, you hate the civil liberties afforded by the Constitution, you hate the separation of Church and State. You might claim to love its economy but you hate all of the states that make up the largest part of it. You hate the Government, you hate people who are anti-Government, you hate the rich because they’re part of a conspiracy…, you hate the poor because you think they’re lazy. You hate this country’s natural beauty because it gets in the way of industry, you hate industry because it keeps giving jobs away to immigrants. You hate immigrants for taking things you feel entitled to, you hate liberals because you feel they’re too entitled. You hate Government interference for getting in the way of Big Business, you hate Big Business for being too globalized. You hate Globalism for taking jobs away from American workers. You hate American workers for unionizing and demanding better jobs. When you say you “love America”, what aspect of America are you actually talking about?

Via CK. Cached.

Nicely played, team. I’d say Mission Accomplished 🍾 That being said, I really hope I don’t have to collect Shitkraken stories anymore (for “completeness.”)

Not sure if this has to do with The Client’s legendary ethics and history of non-payment (one, two, three, four, five, and many, many more) or the Strike Force’s whopping 1.5% success rate. Or maybe The Genius finally realized:

“Your typical role as legal counselor is to tell your client the hard truth and walk them away from risk,” Matthew Sanderson, a Republican political lawyer based in Washington, said in an interview. “Rudy instead seems to tell his client exactly what he wants to hear and walk him toward risk like they’re both moths to a flame.”

Surely can’t the bad-for-ratings hair dye, the insane and casually racist witnesses, or the amazing 1.5% success rate?

By Amii James (Instagram). Context was the Tories but applies to our fine people stateside as well.

Tory ministers saying “we owe it to children to keep schools open” might want to explain to me why they closed my youth centre, cut mental health services, underfunded my secondary school, stripped free school meals from my peers, tripled uni fees, demonised climate strikers…

This is a success rate of ~1.5% 🥇 The Best People folks, lemmetellya.

I’m really tired of this saga of ineptitude and batshittery but will continue to scrapbook these stories for ‘completeness’.

by Marc de Wolf

Confirmation that I did, indeed, see a “No, Georgia the country, idiot” flag. And then there’s this surprising tidbit:

The flags of Canada, Cuba, Georgia, India, Israel, South Korea, and South Vietnam were spotted in the mob. It’s unclear why many of these flags appeared, though a number of the white supremacist and militia groups that were present have international chapters.

India? Ah, yes of course

After profiting off him for four years. People and organizations appear to have found quite a bit of courage to do the right thing these days.

Their statement. See also.

“And I’m sure you’ve also had conversations with other senior White House officials, as I have,” Sasse continued. “As this was unfolding on television, Donald Trump was walking around the White House confused about why other people on his team weren’t as excited as he was as you had rioters pushing against Capitol Police trying to get into the building.”

Sasse added: “He was delighted.”

In a 124-page complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Dominion said its reputation and resale value have been deeply damaged by a “viral disinformation campaign” that Powell mounted “to financially enrich herself, to raise her public profile, and to ingratiate herself to Donald Trump.”

You don’t say.

As Powell’s accusations about Dominion spread after the election, the company’s employees were stalked, harassed and received death threats via email, text and phone: “we are already watching you,” read a text message to one Dominion employee, according to the complaint. “Come clean and you will live.”

[…] She has claimed that Dominion’s voting system was created in Venezuela to rig elections for former Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez and has said that secret algorithms in Dominion machines were used to manipulate votes in favor of Biden in 2020. She has accused the company of bribing Georgia officials to win a no-bid contract with the state. She has promised to tweet a video of Dominion’s founder — Poulos — saying he could “change a million votes, no problem at all.”

No such video ever materialized.

Shocked.jpg. Reddit user @Cycad:

Turns out the real Kraken was the enemies we made along the way…

Perfection. By @schmoyoho and via KP.

Lord of our lives and sovereign of our beloved nation, we deplore the desecration of the United States Capitol building, the shedding of innocent blood, the loss of life, and the quagmire of dysfunction that threaten our democracy.

These tragedies have reminded us that words matter and that the power of life and death is in the tongue. We have been warned that eternal vigilance continues to be freedom’s price.

Lord, you have helped us remember that we need to see in each other a common humanity that reflects your image.

You have strengthened our resolve to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies domestic as well as foreign.

Use us to bring healing and unity to our hurting and divided nation and world. Thank you for what you have blessed our lawmakers to accomplish in spite of threats to liberty.

Bless and keep us. Drive far from us all wrong desires, incline our hearts to do your will and guide our feet on the path of peace. And God bless America. We pray in your sovereign name, amen.

And please get off this gentleman’s lawn and out of his city.

During the four years of the Civil War, the confederates never got closer to Washington than Fort Stevens. Until today, when insurrectionist supporters of @realDonaldTrump paraded through the U.S. Capitol Building carrying the Confederate battle flag.

The ultimate in White privilege is when you’ve broken in to the Speaker’s Lobby, you’ve broken down the windows, and you’re trying to break in to the floor of the House, you’re 12” from a gun, and you’re still not dead.

Call the zip ties by their correct name: The guys were carrying flex cuffs, the plastic double restraints often used by police in mass arrest situations. They walked through the Senate chamber with a sense of purpose. They were not dressed in silly costumes but kitted out in full paramilitary regalia: helmets, armor, camo, holsters with sidearms. At least one had a semi-automatic rifle and 11 Molotov cocktails. At least one, unlike nearly every other right-wing rioter photographed that day, wore a mask that obscured his face.

These are the same guys who, when the windows of the Capitol were broken and entry secured, went in first with what I’d call military-ish precision. They moved with purpose, to the offices of major figures like Nancy Pelosi and then to the Senate floor. What was that purpose? It wasn’t to pose for photos. It was to use those flex cuffs on someone.

Via @igorbobic’s thread:

Brittany Packnett Cunningham on Trump supporters rioting & looting the U.S. Capitol building: “This is the literal example of white supremacy.”

Some real perspective:

the olay body wash at CVS has better security

and

Can’t believe the creators of the monster have lost control of the monster, is there any precedent for this in books or film

and

“May we never forget the brave Wal-Martyrs, Gravy Seals, Green Buffets, Meal Team Six, Delta Farce, and every other Walmart Warrior of the 1st Methanized Infantile Division who fought in the Great American Inbredsurrection”

See also: Nachkommen

Asked about speculation that Mr Trump could travel to Scotland in order to avoid the inauguration, Ms Sturgeon said: "I have no idea what Donald Trump’s travel plans are, you’ll be glad to know.

"I hope and expect that – as everybody expects, not everybody necessarily will hope – that the travel plan immediately that he has is to exit the White House.

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted that “trickle-down economics” had been tried before in the United States in the 1890s under the name “horse-and-sparrow theory”, writing:

Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy—what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: ‘If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.’

Galbraith claimed that the horse-and-sparrow theory was partly to blame for the Panic of 1896. While running against Ronald Reagan for the Presidential nomination in 1980, George H. W. Bush had derided the trickle-down approach as “voodoo economics”. In the 1992 presidential election, independent candidate Ross Perot also referred to trickle-down economics “political voodoo”. In the same election during a presidential town hall debate, Bill Clinton said:

What I want you to understand is the national debt is not the only cause of [declining economic conditions in America]. It is because America has not invested in its people. It is because we have not grown. It is because we’ve had 12 years of trickle-down economics. We’ve gone from first to twelfth in the world in wages. We’ve had four years where we’ve produced no private-sector jobs. Most people are working harder for less money than they were making 10 years ago.

It never made sense and simply doesn’t work.

“World’s richest men added billions to their fortunes last year as others struggled: Billionaires have added about $1 trillion to their total net worth since the pandemic began” (WaPo, Paywall.)

(Even though The Post is a complexifier for me, I do not at all regret my investment. The Post is a critical institution with a critical mission. My stewardship of The Post and my support of its mission, which will remain unswerving, is something I will be most proud of when I’m 90 and reviewing my life, if I’m lucky enough to live that long, regardless of any complexities it creates for me.)

So why can’t the World’s Richest Man fund a paper as “critical” as the Washington Post in perpetuity?

Ronald Ray Cobb was “an American-Australian cartoonist, artist, and film designer” who passed away in September last year. He worked on movies like “Back to the Future”, “Jodorowsky’s Dune”, and “Alien”.

An ornithopter!

But it’s perhaps his cartoons that are more enduring and eeriely relevant after 40 years of their publication.

04 September, 1957

Dorothy Counts, the first and at the time only black student to enroll in the newly desegregated Harry Harding High School in Charlotte (NC), is mocked by protestors on her first day of school. Bystanders threw rocks and screamed at Dorothy to go back to where she came from.

The man walking beside her is probably Dr. Edwin Tompkins, a friend of the family and a professor at the black college Johnson C. Smith University. After a string of abuses, Dorothy’s family withdrew her from the school after only four days. Children had been enrolling for the new school year and tension was particularly high in the south for districts trying to comply with the US Supreme Court’s ruling that states should desegregate their schools with deliberate speed.

I cannot imagine what she must have felt.

“There was unutterable pride, tension and anguish in that girl’s face as she approached the halls of learning, with history jeering at her back,” he later said. “It made me furious. It filled me with both hatred and pity. And it made me ashamed. Some one of us should have been there with her.”

Photos by Douglas Martin.

Well, we could go on forever listing various critiques from both the Left and the Right, so I’ll just cover a few and maybe other people will stop by and list more.

The Left #

Marxism/socialism #

There are lots of criticisms of liberalism from the Marxist and socialist corners. We could be here all day listing them, so I’ll just mention one that hits at the heart of liberalism, which is freedom. The charge is that the kind of freedom valued by liberalism is a very limited kind of freedom, mainly a sort of freedom to be an actor in capitalism. Think of this part from the Communist Manifesto:

And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at. By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying. But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other “brave words” of our bourgeois about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.

So what liberalism conceives of as restrictions on freedom, like for instance the sorts of measures that might be in place in a communist society, are in fact only restrictions on a warped notion of freedom that depends on the conditions of capitalism for its attractiveness.

Feminism #

Again, there are lots of criticisms that fall under this broad umbrella, and I’ll just mention one. Liberalism is very concerned with autonomy and autonomous choices, but many feminist understandings of autonomy move away from the traditional liberal conception of the isolated individual to a notion of autonomy that sees it as an inherently relational property which arises out of people being situated in certain ways in society. If this is our understanding of autonomy, much of classical liberalism makes no sense: for instance, the social contract model of the state, according to which consent from each person is what legitimizes the state, breaks down, because we can’t coherently speak of consent or any other function of an individual’s autonomy until we already have on the table the structure of society. If that structure includes the state, and presumably it does, then the state is somehow prior to the people consenting to it, which is bad news for liberals. We could draw links here to Hegel and communitarianism, which will come up later when we look at the Right.

Anti-Racism #

In The Racial Contract Mills argues that social contract theory is predicated on white supremacy and that all the ostensibly color-blind theories of liberalism built around it are in fact just reifications of racism. Mills actually thinks liberalism can be saved in the form of what he calls “black radical liberalism” (this is a somewhat recent development - see here for instance) but one might disagree with him, and even if we agreed, I think this still counts as a critique of liberalism, right?

Pragmatism #

By this I don’t mean actual philosophical pragmatism but rather the view that sometimes, liberalism isn’t tenable simply because respect for individual rights will lead to consequences too dire to accept. So, this is just a straightforward consequentialist argument: the ends justify the means, and sometimes the ends will require adopting means other than liberalism. So for instance Arneson has advocated for an instrumentalist defense of democracy (see here) according to which there is a right to democratic participation only insofar as democracy is going to generate good results in that society, and if this isn’t the case, then there’s no such right (see also his article “On the Supposed Right to a Democratic Say”). We might call these people fair-weather liberals. They have something in common with the communitarians, insofar as the character of the society in question helps decide whether various facets of liberalism are appropriate.

The Right #

Communitarianism #

This is what has its roots in Hegel, and we can see it in people like Taylor and Sandel, cited here. The broadest possible way of describing what’s going on here is that there are different principles fit for different societies, depending on the character of those societies. So if a society has illiberal traditions, it typically doesn’t make sense to come in with a liberal steamroller and tell them that they’re doing everything wrong and that they have to change. We might think morality simply doesn’t work this way, either because there’s no such universal morality in the first place, or because the way morality works requires it getting a certain foothold in the individual’s life in a way that makes sense to that individual and not all people in all societies will be amenable to liberalism, or whatever. Another facet of this critique (especially from Sandel) echoes the feminist point above: the idea is that it makes no sense to conceive of the individual outside the context of their society, and to talk about the rights and choices of that individual in any meaningful sense.

If you want any more detail on any of these answers, let me know. I’m not sure how much you know about liberalism: I’ve assumed a fair amount of knowledge on your part, and thus left out much of the details in terms of what parts of liberalism these critiques are attacking and how they hurt, insofar as they succeed. I’d be happy to fill that out, or anything else that needs filling out.

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

and

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

I haven’t seen anything that captures the times quite like this work by Willikin Wolf (Patreon, Instagram)

Source: ABC News

Starring Ted Cruz. It cannot be anyone else.

And there’s the 10-hour version (of course) for when a batshit-crazy, cultist conservative whinges about freedom and liberty and censorship and free markets and privatization and regulation and “corporations are people” and the incipient Demise of Western Civilization (due to ‘Marxists’ and Feminists and Immigrants) a little more than usual.

Many years ago interviewed an older gentleman as part of a study I was conducting. He said “Republicans are people who will withhold food from 100 people out fear that 1 might not need or deserve it. Democrats will feed 100 out of concern that 1 might really need it.

With this follow-up:

The flip side of course is that Democrats will regulate 100 businesses out of fear that 1 will be a cheater, but Republicans will eliminate regulations out of fear that one might not survive.

BTW for my part I am 100% with the Democrats on both of these.

I hope Dominion’s lawyers don’t underestimate the Elite Strike-Force Team’s Star Witness’ What-Do-You-Mean-I-Have-To-Make-An-Appointment-Online Energy 😬

“You gained international infamy earlier this month as Rudy Giuliani’s so-called ‘star witness’ who could supposedly corroborate outlandish accusations that Dominion has somehow rigged or otherwise improperly influenced the outcome of the Nov. 2020 U.S. presidential election,” attorneys Thomas Clare and Megan Meier wrote. “Without a shred of corroborating evidence, you have claimed that you witnessed several different versions of voter fraud—ranging from one story involving a van, to other accusations that votes were counted multiple times. You published these statements even though you knew all along that your attacks on Dominion have no basis in reality.”

[…] “We write to you now because you have positioned yourself as a prominent leader of the ongoing misinformation campaign by pretending to have some sort of ‘insider’s knowledge’ regarding Dominion’s business activities, when in reality you were hired through a staffing agency for one day to clean glass on machines and complete other menial tasks,” the letter stated.

Saith The Lord to Socialist Democrats:

ha, nice try. healthcare is about consumer choice. get a job and enroll in a market-based plan.

no peter i won’t help you that will only create dependency pick yourself up by your own sandal straps it’s called personal responsibility.

i would love to give you this, really i would but the richest israelites actually need this more so they can stimulate economic growth!

sorry, feeding you would be a waste of resources. i’m just not seeing results.

One who makes douchebag statements, particularly sexist, racist or otherwise bigoted ones, then decides whether they were “just joking” or dead serious based on whether other people in the group approve or not.

They’re always “just joking.” About pandemic response, about requesting foreign interference in their country’s elections, injecting disinfectants to treat disease, asking for more police brutality, mocking the disabled, treason, dangling pardons like a mob boss, asking foreign governments to investigate political opponents, calling onself “The Chosen One”, calling a former president the founder of a terrorist organization, or condoning violence against journalists. Just look at your face, bro 😆

And then there’s Schrodinger’s Asshole:

A person who decides whether or not they’re full of shit by the reactions of those around them.

Via Mark.

From a while ago: “Rump Faker: Is imitation calamari made from pig rectum? A charming urban legend gets its start.”

In another sign of the lingering unrest over President Donald Trump’s election loss, an Arizona group sent the National Archives in Washington, D.C., notarized documents last week intended to deliver, wrongly, the state’s 11 electoral votes for him.

Mesa resident Lori Osiecki, 62, helped created a facsimile of the “certificate of ascertainment” that is submitted to formally cast each state’s electoral votes as part of an effort to prevent what she views as the fraudulent theft of the election.

“We seated before the legislators here. We already turned it in. We beat them to the game,” she said.

Timing and absolutely nothing else (like, say, legality) is everything, so check and mate. Emphasis mine:

“One thing I will say about conservatives, is if something is wrong, and we have lost — a true loss — then we accept,” she said. “We’re not going to drag people through the mud and fight it. But this clearly has got issues. I saw it with my own eyes and my own research. After that hearing, I was shocked we didn’t have any other marching orders.”

Pack it up, liberals. Lori did her “research”:

But in Trumpland, a vast conspiracy involving Democrats, the Chinese government, an international globalist cabal, rigged voting machines, corrupt state governments, and bought-off poll workers came together to steal the election from Trump. Many have rejected the results of the election entirely.

This includes a one paragraph “Dude… really?” from the Supreme Court over the “bid to invalidate more than 20 million votes.” So. Much. Winning.

“It’s time for this nonsense to end,” Detroit’s lawyer David Fink told Law&Crime in a phone interview. “The lawyers filing these frivolous cases that undermine democracy must pay a price,” Fink added.

but

Asked about the sanctions motion, Powell replied cryptically: “We are clearly over the target.”

On the other hand, every court that has heard her conspiracy theories about a supposed plot involving Dominion voting machines, dead Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, bipartisan government officials and election workers in counties across the United States found that narrative untethered to reality.

When conservative activist Meshawn Maddock obtained a list of allegedly dead Michigan voters, she didn’t report it to law enforcement.

[…]

The list of 150 or so names was part of a larger file of more than 2,000 people who “voted in Wayne County by absentee ballot that are CONFIRMED deceased,” claimed Maddock, a prominent Republican who is seeking to become the party’s state vice chair.

It would appear that the only way to make it in the party is by embracing batshit crazy. But there are pesky little ‘facts’ to contend with:

“I am certainly not dead!” wrote one woman […], including holiday photos of her family she had recently posted.

“Two people in my neighborhood are on this list,” wrote another man. “They’re very much alive. Hell, their boys play baseball with my sons.”

Mr. Babcock speaks for Sane America that’s bewildered by the post-election tantrums like these. Emphases mine:

Among the alleged dead was Bill Babcock, a Grosse Pointe Woods voter who said Tuesday he is “doing fine,” aside from the grueling year-end inventory he was performing in his job as a swimming pool salesman.

“I think it sucks,” he told Bridge Michigan on Tuesday, less than 24 hours after Maddock posted his name and home address in an attempt to prove voter fraud that state officials have not found.

“Can’t we just move on? There are bigger problems out there, like getting this vaccine thing situated,” Babcock said.

The SC swatted it away like the “Garbage, but dangerous garbage” it was, but even this “conservative evangelical American blogger and radio host” just had it with the sycophantic tantrum:

I personally think my company should pay me workers compensation for brain damage for having to read that lawsuit and related filings. It really is one of the stupidest bits of performative leg humping we have seen in the last five years. These attorneys general are willing to beclown themselves and their states all to get in good with the losing presidential candidate.

The suit is absurd on its face. These states seek to interfere in the internal affairs of other states when those states are not actually electing the President, but allowing their voters to chose members of the Electoral College.

The lawsuit appears to be a pile of shit (one wouldn’t expect any less from the Elite Strike Forces that surround the God Emperor) but:

If Texas were to win this, it would dissolve the horizontal federalism of our union and only expand the powers of the federal government. It would also lead to a Civil War as a handful of states overturn the rules and laws of other states and dictate those states’ internal affairs. Wait for Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo to give this precedent a whirl. Wait for progressive states to start suing conservative states over religious liberty, transgender rights, police brutality, tax policies that “steal” residents of progressive states, etc.

One can dream! He ends with a plea (emphasis mine):

I’m really tired of the Republican Party beclowning itself for a losing candidate out of fear for that candidate’s voters. That is all this is and delusions of fools notwithstanding, despite all sorts of stupid arguments being wrapped in pomp and “equal protection” phraseology, the election is over and Joe Biden will be President-Elect officially next week.

Guys, come on — you’re just going to spark crazy to violence [sic] at this point. The election wasn’t stolen and most of you know it and those of you who don’t know it need to, at some point, realize you’ve been lied to. And frankly, Ken Paxton needs to work on repentance for a whole lot of stuff.

Things are so crazy, that’s reasonable stuff from this guy:

“[Cruz] has proven himself neither to be a genius in terms of the law nor a genius, frankly, in terms of [emotional intelligence]. He is a sad sack,” Shapiro, a Democrat, told CNN. “I would say to him — and, frankly, I’d say to my 17 colleagues who have gone along with this circus — I don’t know whether I need to send you a surgeon to examine your spine or a psychiatrist to examine your head. But something’s wrong with you if you continue to follow this president.”

Whatever. I think the Senator would be a lovely and strategic addition to the already Elite-as-fuck Strike Force Team.

Trump has been saying the pandemic has been totally under control since January, and said it would just “go away” in February.

He reiterated this in March as the virus surged, and insisted we had “perfect” tests that anyone could get after reports of faulty tests. He said he wanted pandemic-related shutdowns to end by Easter so churches could be “packed” while claiming Hydroxychloroquine would be a miracle cure for COVID-19.

In April he continued to promote Hydroxychloroquine without evidence and suggested we could inject disinfectants or use UVC light inside the body to kill the virus, and right up through May Trump was discouraging the use of masks and refused to require them anywhere, with him and Pence famously flouting requirements at hospitals and factories. Trump also claimed he was taking Hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic against the disease. At this point they were even planning to dismantle their own COVID-19 task force.

In June they were still insisting it was under control while fighting the FDA’s revocation of authorizations for Hydroxychloroquine, and denying that there was a second surge happening. They instead blamed the high infection statistics on there being more testing, and Trump suggested slowing down testing to improve the stats, noting he does not joke.

Rolling into July he still insisted he had things under control, claiming they had done an incredible job, as the White House nuked a trove of data previously available through the CDC while Trump was still hyping Hydroxychloroquine and his son was temporarily suspended from Twitter for continuing to spread disinformation about it.

Even in August, Trump claimed COVID-19 was totally under control, and the ~150k dead with a simple “it is what it is,”, and reiterated that the virus would go away all on its own. He finally encouraged the wearing of masks, but ignored all guidelines during his nomination acceptance speech at the Republican Convention.

In September Trump was saying that COVID-19 hurt “virtually nobody”, and openly disputed the CDC’s own claims about the effectiveness of masks.

In October Trump got COVID-19, and while still undergoing treatment, went on a quick spin around the hospital to wave to his supporters outside. He was discharged to the White House after only three days, posing for photo-ops without a mask. At this point White House officials finally concede that “we’re not going to control the pandemic.”. This would be the last time the COVID-19 task force would formally meet.

Since then Trump has pretty much avoided any and all public appearances except to complain about the election. November marked the point where a quarter of a million Americans had died of COVID-19. There are now more people dying each day of COVID-19 than died in the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001 or in the Invasion of Normandy.

That’s the joke.

“It has to stop,” Sterling said. Directing his remarks to Trump, he added, “Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone is going to get hurt, someone is going to get shot, someone is going to get killed. And it’s not right.”

Lest any members of the public fail to understand: Certifying the winner of a presidential election, as Sterling (a Republican) did, is not an act of treason. It is the fulfillment of America’s centuries-old tradition of upholding the nation’s most fundamental democratic values.

It’s no longer clear whether Trump’s base is lashing out on its own, or whether the statements by Trump, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Estes and a vast army of other GOP officials are what’s inciting Trump supporters to take vigilante action. What is certain is that the rhetoric is out of control. These are, of course, representatives of the party that claims to support a “pro-life” agenda — even while their words are moving ever closer to driving families from their homes and getting someone killed.

(cached)

“It is indefensible for lawyers to falsely proclaim widespread voting fraud, submit a pattern of frivolous court claims and actively seek to undermine citizens’ faith in our election’s integrity. We condemn this conduct without reservation.” said the letter.

Well, shit. Emphasis mine:

… a judge in Wisconsin dismissed the fourth and final lawsuit, noting that it is voters, not judges, who decide who goes to the White House.

“Federal judges do not appoint the president in this country,” U.S. District Judge Pamela Pepper wrote in a 45-page ruling.

“One wonders why the plaintiffs came to federal court and asked a federal judge to do so. After a week of sometimes odd and often harried litigation, the court is no closer to answering the ‘why.’ But this federal court has no authority or jurisdiction to grant the relief the remaining plaintiff seeks.”

The article notes that Judge Pepper also had to point out the following errors:

• “that Powell had sought 48 hours’ worth of surveillance footage from the TCF Center — which is in Michigan, not Wisconsin.”
• “that Powell misspelled the name of her lead plaintiff, referring to William Feehan, a would-be Trump elector, as ‘Meehan.’”
• “that the plaintiff appeared to have made up a quote purporting to come from a decision made by Pepper’s own colleague Judge J. P. Stadtmueller. The quote simply doesn’t exist.”

About as Elite as it gets.

She then proceeded to attend a WH Party, of course.

President Trump’s lawyer Jenna Ellis has informed associates she tested positive for the coronavirus, multiple sources tell Axios, stirring West Wing fears after she attended a senior staff Christmas party on Friday.

“She had the nerve to show up at the senior staff Christmas party knowing everyone was furious with her for constantly stirring Trump up with nonsense,” said a senior administration official.

Because she sat right next to the Fearless Team Leader, and because I am a child:

We can’t rule out that Rudy’s fart gave Jenna Ellis Covid

In other words, of which there are many, since the Supreme Court needed only 18 to hurl this nonsense into the Tidal Basin, Rep. Mike Kelly handed the Supreme Court of the United States a reeking dead fish and the Court refused delivery. And the Kelly suit looked like it was drafted by Clarence Darrow compared to that idiocy that emerged from Texas Tuesday morning, and Kelly’s suit was something at which even Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito turned up their noses. The administration* is done like dinner. SCOTUS has precious engagements.

A channel name is LEAD SYNTH FART 💯 I am a child and am fine with this.

Mr. Giuliani appeared on Fox News earlier on Sunday. Speaking with the host Maria Bartiromo via satellite, Mr. Giuliani repeated baseless claims about fraud in Georgia and Wisconsin on “Sunday Morning Futures.” When asked if he believed Mr. Trump still had a path to victory, he said, “We do.”

On Monday, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan said that a four-hour hearing last Wednesday with a roomful of unmasked witnesses had all the ingredients of a super-spreader event.

“That hearing last week was reckless, it was unnecessary and didn’t change a thing,” she said. “It’s action like this that threatens our ability to open up some of these businesses.”

A member of The Elite Strike-Force Team bemoaned being “canceled” and asked to resign from an elite club after calling for violence against the country’s former CyberSecurity chief who said that the elections were “the most secure in American history” (which was the opinion that got him fired.) Mercifully, Operation #shitkraken continues to deliver despite this minor upset.

Here’s some lovely, old-school, traditional, conservative barbarism:

“Anybody who thinks the election went well, like that idiot Krebs … he should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot,” diGenova said on the radio show.

Which drew this impassioned response from a Georgia election official:

It was all “hyperbole” and “in jest”, of course! They tend to pick the best subjects for humor. And only the most Elite can handle the spotlight:

“It’s egregious, I’m at a loss for words at how absurd those and offensive those comments were, I think that’s got to violate some type of code of professional conduct for the DC Bar, and I hope they look into it,” Travis, the former deputy director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said at the Aspen Institute’s virtual Cyber Summit on Tuesday.

“He’s a small man with a small mind and bad mustache,” Travis said of diGenova, adding that he hoped diGenova would “take back those words, apologize and recognize that maybe the hot lights of the studio got to him.”

Operation #shitkraken appears to limping along quite well.

A living caricature who could’ve been drunk, who was likened to an SNL character, who put out so much Can-I-See-Your-Manager Conspiracy-Karen Energy she had to be shushed by the flatulent Leader of the Elite Strike-Force Team, who described herself as a “Duchess of CyberSecurity¹”, and who was definitely arrested for harassing her boyfriend’s ex with videos of them having sex.

Imagine my surprise when she was found to be “not credible.” I’d genuinely hoped she was an elite troll and that it was performance art of highest calibre², but there’s a higher likelihood of Mediacom deciding to treat its customers with respect.

Even though both the Fearless Leader and his Elite Sidekick have COVID, she won’t quarantine unless her God Emperor tells her to:

“I would take it seriously if it came from Trump, because Trump cares about American lives,” she said, adding that if fringe networks that regularly traffic in coronavirus misinformation such as One America News or Newsmax “told me to go get tested, I would do it.”

‘Reporters’ at the Failing NYTimes explore: “How Is Trump’s Lawyer Jenna Ellis ‘Elite Strike Force’ Material?” (cached) I should just copypasta the whole thing but here we go:

Since she graduated law school in 2011, nothing in her record in the courtroom […] shows any time spent litigating election law cases.

She holds herself out as an expert on the Constitution based on her self-published book and her teaching of pre-law classes to undergraduates. She has never appeared in federal district or circuit court, where most constitutional matters are considered, according to national databases of federal cases, and does not appear to have played a major role in any cases beyond her criminal and civil work in Colorado.

The Trump campaign and its supporters have so far filed about 50 election-related lawsuits. She has not signed her name or appeared in court to argue a single one.

“I find it astonishing that she’s gotten to this point,” said Stephanie Stout, a lawyer in private practice in Greeley, Colo., who worked with Ms. Ellis a few years ago defending a man who was accused of attempted murder. The partnership was short-lived, Ms. Stout said, because their client fired Ms. Ellis, deeming her not up to the job.

“She just didn’t have the legal chops,” added Ms. Stout, who ultimately won the case on her own. “After that, Jenna decided that I had stolen the case from her.”

Craig Silverman, a lawyer in Denver who used to host a radio show on legal matters and current events that Ms. Ellis occasionally appeared on, described her as “an attorney of scant accomplishment.” The cases she discussed with him, he recalled, were bread-and-butter criminal defense work. And he said he had always expected her to pursue a career in teaching and media — not the law.

[…] Though Mr. Silverman once considered himself friendly with Ms. Ellis, he said her insistence of widespread voter fraud had so unnerved him that he believed she might have violated Colorado’s rules of professional conduct for lawyers, which prohibit making false statements.

In 2015 she joined Colorado Christian University […] [which] does not have a law school or a program in constitutional law. Ms. Ellis taught pre-law and political science to undergraduates and was part of the team that developed and advised a moot court program, according to a university spokesman. Eventually she was made an assistant professor of legal studies — but never a “professor of constitutional law,” which is how she identified herself in pieces for The Washington Examiner that she started writing in 2017.

Here’s how you get noticed and get a spot on the ultra-selective Elite Strike-Force team: become “star player in the president’s theater of grievance and denial”:

But she did have an attribute that can carry just as much weight in his eyes: the ability to go on television and deliver scathing attacks on his critics.

Ms. Ellis beat the drum for the president on cable and wherever else she had a platform.

But those who know Ms. Ellis said they imagined that her willingness to say almost anything in the president’s defense was what he found appealing about her.

Her response is to simply call the entire thing a “false ‘report’” and dream publicly about becoming the next Amy Coney Barrett.

The failing NY Times plans to run a hit piece today. They’re trying to undermine the public’s confidence in the President’s election integrity battle by pushing a false “report” on my credentials & experience.

Well… Libs said ACB wasn’t qualified. And she’s Justice ACB now. 😉

Despite being cut loose from President Donald Trump’s legal team, Powell is forging ahead with her election-conspiracy crusade to overturn Joe Biden’s presidential win.

But the conservative attorney’s self-described Kraken keeps getting its tentacles tied in a knot of typos and errors — including the recent backward claim, later amended, that a pernicious voting algorithm took votes from Biden and flipped them to Trump.

So when she tried to argue that “pernicious” algorithms in Dominion’s voting machines¹ flipped the election in Georgia for her guy? Well it was really late at night and she had other shit to do and she really meant the opposite (emphasis mine):

“If I had a Nicole for every mistake I’ve made in life, I could retire,” Powell’s email to a reporter said. “Wish I had you as a proofreader at 1 a.m.”

“In addition, counsel had internet and computer problems that delayed our communications, in addition to what can only be called ‘operator errors’ by lead counsel late night that caused the omission of the list of authorities and a substantive misstatement thoughtfully identified by CNBC this morning, which the contemporaneously filed brief corrects,” Powell wrote.

That would be a real, casually racist quote from one of Mr. Giuliani’s witnesses testifying in Michigan as part of Operation Shitkraken. I had to save this one.

And: Naturalized Indian people supporting politicians who vilify new immigrants and want to keep them out is kinda on-brand 👏👏👏

To the surprise of no one (well, normal people), “The Kraken”, authored by an ex-member of the “Elite Strike-Force Team”, turned out to be a “truly awful” and unmistakably QAnon-laced lawsuit full of basic formatting, spelling, and grammatical errors that would “drive a proofreader to drink.”

From a must-read via PLG:

This is all batshit crazy. It is as stupid an elections lawsuit as I’ve ever seen. And there’s no guarantee that it’s the worst case we’re going to see, because even though their legal arguments are being dismissed with extreme prejudice, when it comes to the political/propaganda aims of the litigants—this stuff works. Once the true believers are on board, it’s hard to get them off.

[…] The Kraken is the stupidest election fraud lawsuit in history today. But who knows what next week will bring.

Amazing. It’s almost as if The Best People don’t really care about the substance of the lawsuits¹ but want to seen as filing them in the courts of “activist” judges who swat them away, quite unfairly of course, for the sophomoric and baseless crocks of shit they are. Conservative, Republican, Trump-appointed activist judges, that is.

A lovely Techbro aside from the ongoing #shitkraken.

Greg Stenstrom, another poll watcher, said that in Delaware County, 47 USB cards were missing.

“As a computer scientist, an American and a patriot, it doesn’t matter who those votes were for. It was shocking to me that that could even happen,” he said.

“There is no cure for this, no remedy for this. I don’t believe as a citizen and an observer to this, anyone can certify this with a good conscience.”

(Emphasis mine.) Indeed, Gregory. When USB cards go missing, one needs formal training in Algorithms, Data Structures, the Theories of Computation and Complexity, Formal Logic (of course), and more, to express appropriate outrage at an election that’s fraudulent only in your head and only because your guy didn’t win.

Will tag updates as I read them with amusement and disbelief. Armando Ianucci must be weeping right now. All emphases are mine.

In a court filing signed by Rudy Giuliani and Marc Scaringi¹ — the two remaining attorneys on the case after everyone else quit — the campaign asked for the judge to hand over Pennsylvania’s electors.

[…] “You’re asking this court to invalidate more than 6.8 million votes, thereby disenfranchising every single voter in the commonwealth,” Brann said at the hearing. “Can you tell me how this result can possibly be justified?”

And:

Before Tuesday, Rudy Giuliani last registered an appearance in the U.S. federal judiciary in 1992, and in the view of many legal observers, it showed. The former mayor of New York flubbed basic concepts of law and, in at least one instance, displayed a poor command of the English language.

Giuliani confessed that he did not know the word “opacity,” applying the Bizarro World definition that it “probably means you can see.”

“It means you can’t,” U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann corrected².

[…] When pressed by the judge on what standard of scrutiny should be applied to Pennsylvania government’s action, Giuliani replied: “The normal one.”

And because IANAL, some helpful context:

At one point, he even appeared ignorant of the concept of strict scrutiny, a basic and fundamental concept for a practicing lawyer to know when arguing a case on Fourteenth Amendment grounds. Imagine if you were lying in an operating room, about to go under general anesthesia, and heard your surgeon ask, “Hey, what are all these knives for?” Now you are in general orbit around whatever planet on which the former New York mayor happens to be residing.

Onward:

At one point he referred to president-elect Joe Biden as a “crook” and chastised the press for reporting that he has no evidence of fraud. Mr Giuliani has offered no evidence in court of fraud.

[…] He compared election observers being corralled away from the votes counts to a moment in the movie in which the eponymous character asks a witness in court how many fingers he is holding up, claiming that they could not see a thing.

[…] As what appeared to be hair dye dripped down both sides of his face…

[…] Ellis described the assembled lawyers as “an elite strike-force team” working on behalf of the president.

And finally:

President Donald Trump’s campaign says it’s dropping its Michigan election lawsuit because it succeeded in halting certification of election results in Detroit and surrounding Wayne County, despite the outcome already having been certified in favor of President-elect Joe Biden.

An “Absolutely Brilliant” Elite Mercurial Powerhouse Leader of the Best Legal Team³ one could assemble given the seriousness of the charges against our democratic systems, folks. So unbelievably competent, Snopes had to publish an entry about his performance in court 💯

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But his attorneys have repeatedly made elementary errors in those high-profile cases: misspelling “poll watcher” as “pole watcher,” forgetting the name of the presiding judge during a hearing, inadvertently filing a Michigan lawsuit before an obscure court in Washington and having to refile complaints after erasing entire arguments they’re using to challenge results.

“The sloppiness just serves to underscore the lack of seriousness with which these claims are being brought,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine.

[…] “I know crimes. I can smell them,” Giuliani said as streaks of sweat and what appeared to be hair dye ran down the sides of his face. “You don’t have to smell this one. I can prove it to you 18 different ways.”

[…] “Part of the reason he doesn’t have good lawyers is he doesn’t have good claims to bring.”

Huh.

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The painful monologue screeched to a halt whenever Rudy hit the guardrails of judicial questioning. Asked the most important question in nearly any election lawsuit, what standard of review should apply, he was caught completely off guard. For non-lawyers, it’s hard to explain just how appalling this is. Standard of review is the sort of thing that every first-year law student learns. But rather than agreeing with the judge that the case demanded “strict scrutiny,” or arguing that it called for rational basis review, he simply advocated for “the normal one.” If legal Twitter had a voice in that moment, the scream would have been heard around the world.

[…] But what Rudy did next crossed a line: he lied. He didn’t spin, argue, or put his best take on the evidence, he flat-out lied to a judge in open court.

[…] Actually, Rudy’s first lie came before he ever set foot in the Pennsylvania courthouse. On Tuesday morning, Rudy petitioned to represent the Trump campaign, which is a routine step for lawyers appearing out of state. If you aren’t licensed to practice in a court, you have to request permission to argue. Sadly, Rudy couldn’t complete this two-page form without committing perjury. Rudy claimed to be licensed in the District of Columbia, where in fact he’s currently suspended for not paying his dues.

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The only place maybe worse is Michigan, and particularly the city of Detroit. The city of Detroit probably had more voters than it had citizens. I’m exaggerating a bit, but all you have to do is look at statistical data and you can see that the fraud was rampant and out of control.

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It keeps getting more divorced from reality.

“I think we may actually have won Virginia, but that’s another battle,” Mr Giuliani said.

The comments were made during a meeting of Republican state lawmakers in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on Wednesday.

Mr Biden defeated Mr Trump in Virginia by 451,138 votes.

As for Pennsylvania, where the plaintiff literally phoned it in at Gettysburg:

Despite having told a federal judge that theirs was “not a fraud case”, the 76-year-old former mayor of New York introduced a series of Pennsylvania residents to complain about fraud, to cheers and whoops, and the occasional audible sharp intake of breath from the staunchly pro-Trump crowd.

[…] On Monday Pennsylvania certified the vote, meaning that the process is concluded. Mr Biden won the state by 80,555 votes.

[…] He claimed that 682,770 mail-in ballots entered in Allegheny County and Philadelphia were “not observed by any single Republican.”

“They could have been from the same person,” he said. “There could have been multiples, there was no name on them”.

There’s more, of course.

“The mail-in ballots that were received were not inspected at all by any Republicans. They were hidden from Republicans,” he said.

He said he “couldn’t be entirely sure,” though.

And arithmetic, compounded with the passage of time can lead to undemocratic effects:

He expressed surprise, once again, that when he went to sleep Mr Trump was in the lead but that lead evaporated.

“What are the odds that they all switched, overnight? They switched, by the next day.”

The lead evaporated because more Democrats than Republicans voted by mail, and as their votes were slowly counted, the pendulum swung in Mr Biden’s favour.