Kaboodle II
 
 
Lest We Forget the Horrors: A Catalog of Trump’s Worst Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes
 
 
The Dumbest Moments of the Trump Presidency
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
January 6, 2021 - Trumpian Goons Attack America
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The curve of Republican dumbness: Reagan, Quayle, Bush, Palin, Trump
 
The curve of Republican crookedness: Nixon, Trump
 
The end result of Republican mental disease: Trump
 
 
 
 
 
 
There are intellectuals - good, smart people who do good, smart things. And then there are pointy-headed intellectuals. These are the people (marketing manager types) who come up with slogans like "defund the police". The bald stupidity of thinking such a slogan might be effective is mind-boggling. Really --
 
 
 
Trump fans - not only are they misinformed; they are completely unaware that they are misinformed. Studies have shown that people who lack expertise in some area of knowledge often have a cognitive bias that prevents them from realizing that they lack expertise. This is something I have noticed after a lot of experience dealing with marketing managers who think they can pass themselves off as professional web developers or IT experts. It is impossible to get them to understand that they really do not know what they're talking about. They continue to insist, usually with a bright smile, that they know all they need to know, and plow ahead pushing their stupidities into other's faces. Sometimes they have a dim awareness of the holes in their head and will pump a real professional for just enough information to pass on to their bosses as if it were their own expertise. I hate them with hot, heaping, hunks of hate. Trump is the grand-daddy of these assholes.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

-- Voltaire
 

Lord of the Flies
SparkNotes 

"The strong-willed, egomaniacal Jack is the novel’s primary representative of the instinct of savagery, violence, and the desire for power - in short, the antithesis of Ralph. From the beginning of the novel, Jack desires power above all other things. He is furious when he loses the election to Ralph and continually pushes the boundaries of his subordinate role in the group. Early on, Jack retains the sense of moral propriety and behavior that society instilled in him - in fact, in school, he was the leader of the choirboys. The first time he encounters a pig, he is unable to kill it. But Jack soon becomes obsessed with hunting and devotes himself to the task, painting his face like a barbarian and giving himself over to bloodlust. The more savage Jack becomes, the more he is able to control the rest of the group. Indeed, apart from Ralph, Simon, and Piggy, the group largely follows Jack in casting off moral restraint and embracing violence and savagery. Jack’s love of authority and violence are intimately connected, as both enable him to feel powerful and exalted. By the end of the novel, Jack has learned to use the boys’ fear of the beast to control their behavior - a reminder of how religion and superstition can be manipulated as instruments of power."

 
 
 
 
 
Like industrial-age steel companies dumping poisonous waste into waterways, Facebook pumps paranoia and disinformation into the body politic, the toxic byproduct of its relentless drive for profit.
 
 
There’s something very wrong with any definition of freedom that includes the right to gratuitously expose other people to the risk of disease and death — which is what refusing to wear a mask in a pandemic amounts to.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
------------------------------------
 
 
This is a breathtaking onslaught on the truth and the integrity of an upcoming U.S. election. We expect it from Russia, especially after the copious evidence of its disinformation campaign in 2016 to benefit Trump. But to see it emanate from the president of the United States, the attorney general and the head of the Republican Party is nothing short of stunning.

Every one of these claims earns Four Pinocchios.
 
------------------------------------
 
 
 
30,000 Americans died of COVID-19 in August. 4,000 people died in the European Union, which has a larger population.
Our Stable Genius regards this as a great success.
"The numbers... the numbers..."
 
 
 
The Stock Market:
The stock market isn’t the economy: more than half of all stocks are owned by only 1 percent of Americans, while the bottom half of the population owns only 0.7 percent of the market.
 
 
 
 
 

Wyoming has aggressive vote purging laws that disenroll voters who miss a single general election.

Wyoming removed 66,301 people from its voter rolls in the first three months of 2019——more than 23 percent of the state’s total registered voters.

None of Wyoming’s neighbors remove people from the voter database for skipping just one election. Montana, Colorado, and Idaho wait for two cycles, while Nebraska and Utah don’t remove people from the voter rolls at all for inactivity.

In most other states, registering to vote outside the polls is easy. You just go online and sign up with your driver’s license or other state ID. Not in Wyoming.

In 2018, 45 percent of all voter registrations in the United States came through motor vehicle offices. But not in Wyoming.

Wyoming voter rules prohibit “third-party” voter registration drives. They do this by disallowing organizations from submitting “batches” of voter registration forms that they collect.

If a Wyoming resident does want to register somewhere else, they must fill out a mail-in registration form in the presence of a “notary public,” have the notary stamp and verify it, make a copy of their driver’s license, and mail the whole package to the county clerk’s office.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE SECOND COMING
 
 
    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.
 
 
    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
 
 
    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 
 
 
-- Yeats
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The president raves of “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons” while ensconced in a blast-proof basement. Angered by cable-newscasts noting that fact, he had armored and helmeted police sweep a park of peaceful protesters before a curfew, using smoke grenades, flash bangs, and the threat of batons. All this so that he could stand before a church that he could not enter and where he was not welcome, holding the book that he has probably never read and cannot understand, and whose precepts are a reproach to the life he has led. He is a malignant, empty human being.

-- Eliot A. Cohen, Dean of SAIS at Johns Hopkins University
 
 
Trump demands protection from everybody around him, but nobody is protected from Trump. Story of America.
- Frank Bruni
 
 
At a time of crisis, America is led by a whiny, childlike man whose ego is too fragile to let him concede ever having made any kind of error. And he has surrounded himself with people who share his lack of character.
-- Paul Krugman
 
 
 
 
For Republicans, that pro-life slogan of theirs is just another term for nothing left to lose. They are now the party of death.
-- Timothy Egan
 
 
The more I hear Dr. Fauci say that he does not know something, the more closely I listen to him discuss what he is sure of.
-- Dov Seidman
 
 
 
 
 
 
One thing the coronavirus has thrown into sharp relief is the centrality of quackery — confident pronouncements on technical subjects by people who have no idea what they’re talking about — to the whole enterprise of modern conservatism.
 
A political movement that demands absolute loyalty considers quacks more reliable than genuine experts.
 
-- Paul Krugman
 
 

But then came the tea party, the anti-government conservatism that infected the Republican Party in 2010 and triumphed with President Trump’s election. Perhaps the best articulation of its ideology came from the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, who once said: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

They got their wish. What you see today is your government, drowning — a government that couldn’t produce a rudimentary test for coronavirus, that couldn’t contain the pandemic as other countries have done, that couldn’t produce enough ventilators for the sick or even enough face masks and gowns for health-care workers.

It is not an exaggeration to say that this ideology caused the current debacle with a deliberate strategy to sabotage government.

Now they know: When you drown the government in the bathtub, people die.


-- Dana Milbank

 
 
Trump Talks About COVID-19

Jan. 22: The president tells CNBC that “we have it totally under control” and “it’s going to be just fine.”

Jan. 24: Trump praises and gives thanks to China for its efforts to contain the coronavirus, and adds: “It will all work out well.”

Jan. 30: Trump says at a rally in Michigan: “We think we have it very well under control.”

Feb. 2: Trump goes on Sean Hannity’s show and claims: “We pretty much shut it down, coming in from China.” Trump extols our “tremendous relationship” with China, and adds: “We did shut it down, yes.”

Feb. 10: Trump claims that “a lot of people” think the coronavirus “goes away in April with the heat,” adding that we only have “11 cases,” and that “we’re in great shape.”

Feb. 26: Trump claims the media is conspiring with Democrats to hype the coronavirus to rattle the markets. Trump also says the coronavirus is “going very substantially down, not up.”

Feb. 27: Trump hails his administration’s handling of the coronavirus, and while he does reveal a hint of uncertainty, he says: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”

Feb. 28: Trump shouts at a rally in South Carolina that Democrats’ criticism of his response (which proved entirely accurate) is “their new hoax.”

March 9: Trump dismissively compares the coronavirus with flu, claiming flu kills tens of thousands annually and that “life & the economy go on.”

March 10: Trump again hails the “great job” he’s doing on the coronavirus, and declares: “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”

March 13: Asked about the administration’s epic failure to ramp up testing, Trump declares: “I don’t take responsibility at all.”

March 17: After all that, Trump preposterously proclaims: “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”
 
Trump tweet on 03/29/2020, when there are over 150,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, over 2400 dead:

“President Trump is a ratings hit. Since reviving the daily White House briefing Mr. Trump and his coronavirus updates have attracted an average audience of 8.5 million on cable news, roughly the viewership of the season finale of ‘The Bachelor.’ Numbers are continuing to rise..."
 
While doctors and nurses across the country battle the pandemic to the point of exhaustion, while thousands of families grieve for lost loved ones, and while tens of thousands more struggle through illness, the president of the United States is looking into a mirror, asking it to assure him that he is the fairest of them all.

- Joel Mathis
 
Yes, he really is that morally depraved. What a disgusting monster this moronic chickenshit is.
 
 
 
 
Socialism is a scareword they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years. Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called social security. Socialism is what they called farm price supports. Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance. Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.

HARRY S. TRUMAN, speech, Oct. 10, 1952
 
 
"I've been briefed on every contingency you could possibly imagine. Many contingencies. A lot of positive. Different numbers, all different numbers, very large numbers, and some small numbers, too... it's really working out and a lot of good things are going to happen." - Donald Trump, 3/10/202.
 
Yes, he really is that dumb.
 
 
 
The Ethically-Trained Programmer

“It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.” — Nathaniel Borenstein, 1992
 
 
 
 
 
 
In America, Republicans seem incapable of coming up with any proposal that doesn’t involve tax cuts for the rich.
 
 
Acronym and Shadow
 
A programmer's worst nightmare is having to deal with marketing departments full of narcissists who think they're IT experts or "webmasters". I think marketing managers and political campaign managers probably have a lot in common. The application they produced for the Iowa caucuses is a prime example of these morons pretending to have expertise they don't have and pushing themselves into places they don't belong.
 
 
 
 
 
Tara McGowan, co-founder of Acronym:
“With Shadow, we’re building a new model incentivized by adoption over growth.”

Idiotic flapdoodle like that speaks for itself.
 
 

The Constitution is at the foundation of our Republic’s success, and we each strive not to lose sight of our promise to defend it. The Constitution established the vehicle of impeachment that has occupied both houses of Congress for these many days. We have labored to faithfully execute our responsibilities to it. We have arrived at different judgments, but I hope we respect each other’s good faith.

The allegations made in the articles of impeachment are very serious. As a Senator-juror, I swore an oath, before God, to exercise “impartial justice.” I am a profoundly religious person. I take an oath before God as enormously consequential. I knew from the outset that being tasked with judging the President, the leader of my own party, would be the most difficult decision I have ever faced. I was not wrong.

The House Managers presented evidence supporting their case; the White House counsel disputed that case. In addition, the President’s team presented three defenses: first, that there can be no impeachment without a statutory crime; second, that the Bidens’ conduct justified the President’s actions; and third that the judgement of the President’s actions should be left to the voters. Let me first address each of those defenses.

The historic meaning of the words “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the writings of the Founders and my own reasoned judgement convince me that a president can indeed commit acts against the public trust that are so egregious that while they are not statutory crimes, they would demand removal from office. To maintain that the lack of a codified and comprehensive list of all the outrageous acts that a president might conceivably commit renders Congress powerless to remove a president defies reason.

The President’s counsel noted that Vice President Biden appeared to have a conflict of interest when he undertook an effort to remove the Ukrainian Prosecutor General. If he knew of the exorbitant compensation his son was receiving from a company actually under investigation, the Vice President should have recused himself. While ignoring a conflict of interest is not a crime, it is surely very wrong.

With regards to Hunter Biden, taking excessive advantage of his father’s name is unsavory but also not a crime. Given that in neither the case of the father nor the son was any evidence presented by the President’s counsel that a crime had been committed, the President’s insistence that they be investigated by the Ukrainians is hard to explain other than as a political pursuit. There is no question in my mind that were their names not Biden, the President would never have done what he did.

The defense argues that the Senate should leave the impeachment decision to the voters. While that logic is appealing to our democratic instincts, it is inconsistent with the Constitution’s requirement that the Senate, not the voters, try the president. Hamilton explained that the Founders’ decision to invest senators with this obligation rather than leave it to voters was intended to minimize—to the extent possible—the partisan sentiments of the public.

This verdict is ours to render. The people will judge us for how well and faithfully we fulfilled our duty. The grave question the Constitution tasks senators to answer is whether the President committed an act so extreme and egregious that it rises to the level of a “high crime and misdemeanor.”

Yes, he did.

The President asked a foreign government to investigate his political rival.

The President withheld vital military funds from that government to press it to do so.

The President delayed funds for an American ally at war with Russian invaders.

The President’s purpose was personal and political.

Accordingly, the President is guilty of an appalling abuse of the public trust.

What he did was not “perfect”— No, it was a flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security interests, and our fundamental values. Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.

In the last several weeks, I have received numerous calls and texts. Many demand that, in their words, “I stand with the team.” I can assure you that that thought has been very much on my mind. I support a great deal of what the President has done. I have voted with him 80% of the time. But my promise before God to apply impartial justice required that I put my personal feelings and biases aside. Were I to ignore the evidence that has been presented, and disregard what I believe my oath and the Constitution demands of me for the sake of a partisan end, it would, I fear, expose my character to history’s rebuke and the censure of my own conscience.

I am aware that there are people in my party and in my state who will strenuously disapprove of my decision, and in some quarters, I will be vehemently denounced. I am sure to hear abuse from the President and his supporters. Does anyone seriously believe I would consent to these consequences other than from an inescapable conviction that my oath before God demanded it of me?

I sought to hear testimony from John Bolton not only because I believed he could add context to the charges, but also because I hoped that what he said might raise reasonable doubt and thus remove from me the awful obligation to vote for impeachment.

Like each member of this deliberative body, I love our country. I believe that our Constitution was inspired by Providence. I am convinced that freedom itself is dependent on the strength and vitality of our national character. As it is with each senator, my vote is an act of conviction. We have come to different conclusions, fellow senators, but I trust we have all followed the dictates of our conscience.

I acknowledge that my verdict will not remove the President from office. The results of this Senate Court will in fact be appealed to a higher court: the judgement of the American people. Voters will make the final decision, just as the President’s lawyers have implored. My vote will likely be in the minority in the Senate. But irrespective of these things, with my vote, I will tell my children and their children that I did my duty to the best of my ability, believing that my country expected it of me. I will only be one name among many, no more or less, to future generations of Americans who look at the record of this trial. They will note merely that I was among the senators who determined that what the President did was wrong, grievously wrong.

We’re all footnotes at best in the annals of history. But in the most powerful nation on earth, the nation conceived in liberty and justice, that is distinction enough for any citizen.

 

-- Mitt Romney

 

 
"I never understood wind. I know windmills very much, I have studied it better than anybody."
-- Donald Trump
 
 
 
 
 
 
"It’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas. We’re going to change that."

- Donald Trump

"It’s just so unfair..."
"It’s just so unfair..."
"It’s just so unfair..."
"Can someone please change my diapers?"
 
 
 
Do not, as my party did, underestimate the evil, desperate nature of evil desperate people. Do not come to this fight believing that the Trump team views any action, including outright criminality, as off limits. [The 2020 election] is a battle that decides whether they have an unlimited runway to create a dynastic kleptocracy based on an authoritarian personality cult that makes North Korea look like Sweden, or whether the immune system of the Republic kicks in and purges them from the body public …

There is no bottom. There is no shame. There are no limits … He is surrounded by cowards with frightening and tremendous skills …

- Rick Wilson, Running Against the Devil
 
 
The degree to which this president has monetized the presidency for the direct benefit of himself, his soft-jawed offspring, and his far-flung empire of bullshit makes the Teapot Dome scandal look like a warm-up act in the Corruption Olympics.

Then Trump came along ... The monster is out of its cage, and its new trainers (both here and in Russia) encourage only its dumbest, darkest, most capricious, cruel and violent behaviors.

All the things evangelicals had said for generations that made a candidate anathema were suddenly just fine … Being a goddamned degenerate pussy-grabber with a lifetime of adultery, venality, and dishonesty is not, to my knowledge, one of the core tenets of the Christian faith … Trump has opened entirely new theological avenues … There is literally not one aspect of Trump’s behavior as a citizen, a husband, and as a man that shows the slightest scintilla of repentance for anything, ever.

- Rick Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies
 
 
 
 
 
 
The civil service has been purged and ruined under the Trump administration. The civil service makes government work. The State Department is a particularly sad example. Career civil servants have been purged because of ideological tests. This can take the form of leader loyalty — which is an ideology of loyalty. It could mean Trump removing experts who know that climate change is real. Civil rights as well. For example, The Department of Health and Human Services under Trump now has a “civil rights office” devoted to the “rights” of right-wing Christian evangelicals who believe their freedom is violated by doctors who agree to perform abortions. The state has been hollowed out. Expertise is gone and ideology rules. The state, the government bureaucracy and civil service are now just a vehicle for the authoritarian leader’s goals.

- Ruth Ben-Ghiat
 
 
 
 
 
 
Meghan McCain and Rep. Adam Schiff on "The View", 2020-01-13


McCain:
“Ethics aside, impeachment is a deeply political process and given the intense divide over the issue and the current standoff you guys are having, do you think just purely political was this a good political move for Democrats, and is there any indication that this has damaged President Trump? Because poll numbers say that it hasn’t.”


Schiff:
“If you’re going to look at the poll numbers, what you’ll see over the last three months is the country moving from a majority of Americans believing that we shouldn’t even have an impeachment investigation to overwhelming support for the investigation and a majority, although a narrow majority, of Americans saying that the Senate should convict and remove the president from office. So that’s been a pretty substantial change.

In terms of what impact it will have in November, I really can’t say. That’s not a question, frankly, I’ve been asking myself because I don’t think that’s my role. I think we in the House had to determine is this the right thing to do, is this the constitutionally required thing to do.

What convinced me, Meghan — and you may recall I was not eager to go down the road to impeachment — is when the president committed this latest and most egregious misconduct, the shakedown of the Ukrainian president, withheld military support to an ally at war and was on the phone literally a day after Bob Mueller testified, the day after the president believed he had escaped accountability for the first foreign interference to help his election, he was back at it again. That told me that he believes he is above the law, unaccountable, and we needed to move forward. Even if the Senate won’t do their constitutional duty, we in the House need to do ours.”


McCain:
“I mean, I hear your side of the argument that President (Bill) Clinton’s impeachment trial lasted only a month, and if that’s the case Senate Democrats who are running for president in 2020 are going to be holed up on the Hill instead of campaigning well into the first two primaries. Say what you will about the constitution and duty, this will hurt Democrats politically. Do you disagree?”


Schiff:
“If senators are doing their job, if they are being impartial jurors, if they are doing their duty under the Constitution, that ought to inure to their benefit. I’ve always felt that the best campaign was simply doing a good job, and I don’t think voters are going to hold it against senators for taking the impeachment of the president of the United States seriously, so I don’t think it should be an impediment to them.

But more important, I don’t think it’s a question of, say what you will about the Constitution. I think it is our duty to uphold the Constitution, and if we allow a president to behave like this, if we allow a president, this president or any other, to seek foreign help, to coerce foreign help in a U.S. election, if we let a president obstruct any investigation into their own wrongdoing, that is going to have enormous repercussions. We’re going to have to expect a far greater degree of corruption and malfeasance not only with this president but any in the future. There’s a lot at stake here and if it means that senators are off the campaign trial for a couple more weeks, I think it’s worth the trade.”
 
 
 
The new analysis shows the past five years are the top five warmest years recorded in the ocean and the past 10 years are also the top 10 years on record. The amount of heat being added to the oceans is equivalent to every person on the planet running 100 microwave ovens all day and all night.

Hotter oceans lead to more severe storms and disrupt the water cycle, meaning more floods, droughts and wildfires, as well as an inexorable rise in sea level. Higher temperatures are also harming life in the seas, with the number of marine heatwaves increasing sharply.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The naturalistic fallacy: the idea that a natural remedy is inherently better than a pharmaceutical remedy. That concept is demonstrably false. It doesn’t matter whether a remedy comes from a plant or a laboratory; what matters is whether it is effective and safe. Around half of pharmaceuticals were derived from plants. Drug companies improved the natural remedy using science. They identified and isolated the active ingredient, developed a pure version with a controlled dosage, and often synthesized the active compound and altered it to improve its efficacy and safety.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
---------------------------------------------------
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The spread of true and false news online

As politicians have implemented a political strategy of labeling news sources that do not support their positions as unreliable or fake news, whereas sources that support their positions are labeled reliable or not fake, the term has lost all connection to the actual veracity of the information presented, rendering it meaningless for use in academic classification.

When we analyzed the diffusion dynamics of true and false rumors, we found that falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information. Falsehood also reached far more people than the truth.

The greater likelihood of people to retweet falsity more than the truth is what drives the spread of false news, despite network and individual factors that favor the truth.

Human behavior contributes more to the differential spread of falsity and truth than automated robots do. This implies that misinformation-containment policies should also emphasize behavioral interventions, like labeling and incentives to dissuade the spread of misinformation, rather than focusing exclusively on curtailing bots.

Science magazine

 
**************************
 
From "Zucked":
Being able to show 2 billion people 2 billion different versions of truth is really terrifying.
 
**************************
 
People find it so hard to admit to large errors that they often respond to failure by doubling down on their mistakes. Some World War I generals butchered their men with repeated frontal assaults on enemy trenches, in an apparent attempt to vindicate their initial stupidity. Students of business history talk about a phenomenon they call “escalation of commitment,” in which managers not only refuse to abandon failing strategies but dig in deeper, in an attempt to prove that they were right all along.

Which brings me to the hole elected Republicans, especially in the Senate, have dug for themselves.

How many G.O.P. senators still have a conscience?
 
 
**************************
 
“It’s like showing up at the nursing home at daybreak to find your elderly uncle running pantsless across the courtyard and cursing loudly about the cafeteria food, as worried attendants tried to catch him. You’re stunned, amused, and embarrassed all at the same time. Only your uncle probably wouldn’t do it every single day, his words aren’t broadcast to the public, and he doesn’t have to lead the US government once he puts his pants on.”

-- A senior Trump administration official
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
trumpisnuts.jpg
 
 
41% of voters earning less than $50,000 voted for Trump. 53% voted for Clinton.
49% of voters earning between $50,000 and $100,000 voted for Trump. 47% voted for Clinton.
 
 
 
 
 

Hitler's dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history.

His was the first dictatorship that made the complete use of all technical means for domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and loudspeaker, 80 million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man.

-- Albert Speer

[Substitute "Facebook and Twitter" for "radio and loudspeaker".]

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Regarding Robert E. Lee:
"To describe this man as an American hero requires ignoring the immense suffering for which he was personally responsible, both on and off the battlefield. It requires ignoring his participation in the industry of human bondage, his betrayal of his country in defense of that institution, the battlefields scattered with the lifeless bodies of men who followed his orders and those they killed, his hostility toward the rights of the freedmen and his indifference to his own students waging a campaign of terror against the newly emancipated." - Adam Sewer, The Myth of the Kindly General
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Donald Trump and Republicans just celebrated voting to let thousands of Americans die so that billionaires get tax breaks. Think about that. - Bernie Sanders
 
 
 
 
A few accurate descriptions of Trump:
Inside-out lower intestine
Bursting landfill of municipal solid waste
Sputum-filled Orange Julius
Monument to human hubris crafted out of rotting Spam
Horsehair mattress stuffed with molding copies of Hustler
Shrieking carbuncle in a red power tie
The embodiment of a long and thunderous fart in a stalled elevator
A wizened ogre of a man with a mouth like an anus
A burlap sack full of rancid Peeps
 
 
 
 
 
According to Laffer’s theory, Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts should have paid for themselves, enabling Reagan to keep his pledge to balance the budget within four years. Instead, the budget deficit exploded. Previous to that, the size of the debt as a fraction of the economy had been falling continually since World War II, with a modest exception during the Nixon-Ford years.
 
Under Reagan it began to climb sharply. The ratio of the national debt to the gross domestic product had fallen from 117.5 percent at the end of World War II to 32.5 percent when Reagan took office. It jumped to 53.1 percent by the time he left office and 66.1 percent by the time President George H.W. Bush left office in 1993. Under Bill Clinton it fell to 56.4 percent, before George W. Bush’s famous tax cuts helped drive the ratio all the way to 84.2 percent by the time he left office in 2009.
 
In short, Reagan’s Laffer-inspired tax cuts (repeated under Bush) were exactly the wrong thing to do — if you actually cared about controlling government debt, something conservatives have always claimed to. Nowadays, even top conservative economists no longer claim that tax cuts will inevitably pay for themselves. It’s not even close.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
"Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen."
-- Mort Sahl
 
 
..........................................................
 
It is sad that success in producing something simple is that the effort and intelligence required to achieve that simplicity is hidden by that simplicity.
...
A model is a communication tool.  If your intended audience cannot understand it then it is a failed model no matter how technically correct it may be.
...
A successful outcome is being able to produce a view of the model at the level that the audience is capable of understanding.


"The Power of the Data Model", David Poole, 2017/02/14
 
..........................................................
 
 
 
 
What is most alarming about the president and his accomplices in the dissemination of factoids is not that they do not know this or that. And it is not that they do not know. Rather, it is that they do not know what it is to know something.
-- George Will
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

I love you all, and I know the goodness of your hearts, and your desire to go out there and show that we are politically neutral and share good will. That is the image Choir wishes to present and the message they desperately want to send.

I also know, looking from the outside in, it will appear that Choir is endorsing tyranny and facism by singing for this man.

Tyranny is now on our doorstep; it has been sneaking its way into our lives through stealth. Now it will burst into our homes through storm.

-- Jan Chamberlin, Mormon Tabernacle Choir, in her resignation letter upon hearing the Choir would sing for Trump

See the Full Post

 
 
 
 
 
 
 "No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American."
    - Dorothy Thompson, speaking of Adolf Hitler in 1935
 
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"It’s the equivalent of going into a library and asking a librarian about Judaism and being handed 10 books of hate. Google is doing a horrible, horrible job of delivering answers here."

    -- Danny Sullivan, the founding editor of SearchEngineLand.com
 
"The more people who search for information about Jews, the more people will see links to hate sites, and the more they click on those links (very few people click on to the second page of results) the more traffic the sites will get, the more links they will accrue and the more authoritative they will appear. This is an entirely circular knowledge economy that has only one outcome: an amplification of the message. Jews are evil. Women are evil. Islam must be destroyed. Hitler was one of the good guys."
 
"We are talking about the most powerful mind-control machine ever invented in the history of the human race. And people don’t even notice it."
 
 
 
     ... a vast satellite system of rightwing news and propaganda that has completely surrounded the mainstream media system.
 
 
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-- Charles Blow, NY Times
 
 
 
 
 
Here Comes Trump
twistythetrump.jpg
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Donald: "an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul."
 
 
 

DSM-5 criteria for narcissistic personality disorder include these features:

  • Having an exaggerated sense of self-importance
  • Expecting to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it
  • Exaggerating your achievements and talents
  • Being preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the perfect mate
  • Believing that you are superior and can only be understood by or associate with equally special people
  • Requiring constant admiration
  • Having a sense of entitlement
  • Expecting special favors and unquestioning compliance with your expectations
  • Taking advantage of others to get what you want
  • Having an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others
  • Being envious of others and believing others envy you
  • Behaving in an arrogant or haughty manner
 
 

1. Are highly reactive to criticism. This is why if they’re asked a question that might oblige them to admit some vulnerability, deficiency, or culpability, they’re apt to falsify the evidence (i.e., lie—yet without really acknowledging such prevarication to themselves), hastily change the subject, or respond as though they’d been asked something entirely different.

2. ...Have low self-esteem. Inasmuch as their elaborate defense system effectively wards off their having to face what their bravado masks, they’re highly skilled at exhibiting, or “posturing,” exceptionally high self-esteem. But their deeper insecurities are yet discernible in their so often fishing for compliments and their penchant for bragging and boasting about their (frequently exaggerated) achievements. That is, they’re experts at complimenting themselves! And when—despite all their self-aggrandizement— others are critical of them, they...

3. ...Can be inordinately self-righteous and defensive. Needing so much to protect their overblown but fragile ego, their ever-vigilant defense system can be extraordinarily easy to set off. I’ve already mentioned how reactive they typically are to criticism, but in fact anything said or done that they perceive as questioning their competence can activate their robust self-protective mechanisms.

4. ...React to contrary viewpoints with anger or rage. The reason that feelings of anger and rage are so typically expressed by them is that in the moment they externalize the far more painful anxiety- or shame-related emotions hiding just beneath them. When they’re on the verge of feeling—or re-feeling—some hurt or humiliation from their past, their consequent rage conveniently “transfersthese unwanted feelings to another.

5. ...Project onto others qualities, traits, and behaviors they can’t—or won’t—accept in themselves. Because they’re compelled from deep within to conceal deficits or weaknesses in their self-image, they habitually redirect any unfavorable appraisal of themselves outwards, unconsciously trusting that doing so will forever keep at bay their deepest suspicions about themselves.

6. ...Have poor interpersonal boundaries. It’s been said about narcissists that they can’t tell where they end and the other person begins. Unconsciously viewing others as “extensions” of themselves, they regard them as existing primarily to serve their own needs—just as they routinely put their needs before everyone else’s (frequently, even their own children). Even beyond this, their porous boundaries and unevenly developed interpersonal skills may prompt them to inappropriately dominate conversations and share with others intimate details about their life (though some narcissists, it should be noted, can display an extraordinary, however Machiavellian, social savvy). Such private information would probably focus on disclosing facts others would be apt to withhold. But having (at least consciously) much less of a sense of shame, they’re likely to share things they’ve said or done that most of us would be too embarrassed or humiliated to admit. Still, with an at times gross insensitivity to how others might react to their words, they’re likely to blurt out things, or even boast about them, that others can’t help but view as tasteless, demeaning, insulting, or otherwise offensive.

 

The nature of narcissists' personality disorder is so profound and so primitive that narcissists damage virtually everyone who comes into contact with them. They hurt their children in ways that are hardly imaginable to anyone who hasn't been there. Narcissists elicit profound and primitive wrath and hostility from sane and stable people. This damages the social fabric by alienating the very people who might possibly be able to counterbalance the narcissists' malign influences.

Narcissists are generally not candidates for conventional analytical treatment, since psychological analysis is a dialogue and narcissism is a soliloquy. Because of narcissists' incapacity for genuine relationship, their treatment tends to be of the "Band-Aid" variety that deals with specific acute difficulties, such as depression, which can be treated with drugs. Part of Narcissistic Personality Disorder is the conviction is that "I'm okay, it's everybody else who's not okay," so narcissists rarely seek treatment voluntarily. Some wait until they are in such bad shape that they require hospitalization. Because narcissists' self-image is so scanty and fragile, they depend on the reflection of themselves in others' perception to be aware of themselves; sometimes it is really as if these people do not have bodies, have no real material existence. Therefore, social isolation, such as comes following the loss of a job, the failure of a marriage, or the alienation of friends and family, has swift and terrible effects on narcissists. Their thinking quickly deteriorates into chaotic incoherency and disorganization. For this reason, when they do receive treatment, the therapists' first order of business is to restore and fortify the narcissists' ego defenses -- i.e., the therapist must help the narcissist recover the habitual grandiose and self-obsessed self-image. When reasonably recovered, the narcissist usually leaves therapy before any work can be done on the underlying personality disorder.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Bruce Springsteen on Trump: "The republic is under siege by a moron."
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
"Reagan found out how fiscally irresponsible big tax cuts for the rich could be when he signed what some have called the largest tax cut in history in his first year in office, which quickly led to a steep drop in government revenue and thus a swelling deficit. Just one year after his massive tax cut, Reagan signed a massive tax increase, to make up for the revenue shortages that the previous cut had created. Then in 1983 he signed an increase on the regressive payroll tax. Nevertheless, by the time Reagan left the White House in 1989, the national debt had nearly tripled."
 
 
God save us from all these millions who get their news from "bite-size informational crap-dumplings shared on Facebook."
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-- Washington Post, April 27, 2012
 
 
 
 
"Anyone capable of voting for Donald Trump is capable of voting for a turd floating in a bucket."
   -- Paul Ryanstein
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Time Magazine's Asinine Cover Story on the National Debt:
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The War Criminals Bush and Cheney Should Be Tried and Marched to the Nearest Gallows
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
-- Beckett
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) is a propaganda front-group created by the avaricious traitors David and Charles Koch. 
 
 
 
 
 
A few quotes from Albert Einstein:
 
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war. The very prevention of war requires more faith, courage and resolution than are needed to prepare for war."
-
 
"I look upon myself as a man. Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind."
 
 
 
 
 
Matt Taibbi is a National Treasure
"...once you kiss the ring, you're a non-factor, a good German."
 
 
 
 
George Bush, America's Chief Moron
"The hero in American culture, meanwhile, was always a moron with a big gun who learned everything he needed to know from cowboy movies."
 
 
 
 
"Good ideas don't have to be sold with fairy dust." -- Paul Krugman
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Dick Cheney: cowardly, draft-dodging, lying, thieving, mass murdering insect.
 
George Bush: cowardly, draft-dodging, deserting, lying, thieving, mass murdering insect.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
"In the private sector, you actually have to balance budgets in order to prioritize, to keep the main thing, the main thing, and he knows the main thing: A president is to keep us safe economically and militarily," she said. "He knows the main thing, and he knows how to lead the charge. So troops, hang in there, because help's on the way, because he, better than anyone, isn't he known for being able to command, fire!"
-- Sarah Palin, one of America's greatest treasures, endorsing Donald Trump
 
 
 
 
 

I. Although Some GMO Sympathizers Embrace Mandatory Labeling, It's A Disaster In Waiting

II. The Real Cost Of Mandatory GMO Labeling

III. Why We Oppose GMO Labeling: Science and the Law

Jon Entine
Exec Director, Genetic Literacy Project;
Senior Fellow, World Food Center Institute for Food and Agricultural Literacy, University of California-Davis

 
 
 
 
 
In a society so often intoxicated by consumerism and hedonism, wealth and extravagance, appearances and narcissism, Jesus calls us to act soberly, in other words, in a way that is simple, balanced, consistent, capable of seeing and doing what is essential … Amid a culture of indifference which not infrequently turns ruthless, our style of life should instead be devout, filled with empathy, compassion and mercy, drawn daily from the wellspring of prayer.
 
-- Pope Francis, midnight mass, Christmas 2015
 
 
 

The Republican Fear of Facts on Guns

Wyoming, the state with the highest rate of gun deaths, also has the highest per capita costs for gun violence — about $1,400 per resident per year, which is twice the national average.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

In Jesus' time, Samaritans and Jews generally despised each other:

Jesus answered, "A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who both stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. By chance a certain priest was going down that way. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side. In the same way a Levite also, when he came to the place, and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he travelled, came where he was. When he saw him, he was moved with compassion, came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. He set him on his own animal, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. On the next day, when he departed, he took out two denarii, and gave them to the host, and said to him, 'Take care of him. Whatever you spend beyond that, I will repay you when I return.' Now which of these three do you think seemed to be a neighbour to him who fell among the robbers?"

He said, "He who showed mercy on him."

Then Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."

-- Luke 10:30–37

 
 
What is wanted is not the will-to-believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite.
-- Bertrand Russell
 
Most of the greatest evils man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.
-- Bertrand Russell
 
 
 
 
 
 
The War Prayer - Mark Twain
 
 
What ISIS Really Wants - The Atlantic
 
 
America is Too Dumb for TV News - Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
 
 
As Scott McConnell wrote for The American Conservative in September:

By one not unreasonable estimate, as many as four million Muslims have died or been killed as a result of the ongoing conflicts that Washington has either initiated or been party to since 2001. There are, in addition, millions of displaced persons who have lost their homes and livelihoods, many of whom are among the human wave currently engulfing Europe. There are currently an estimated 2,590,000 refugees who have fled their homes from Afghanistan, 370,000 from Iraq, 3,880,000 million from Syria, and 1,100,000 from Somalia.

… Significantly, the countries that have generated most of the refugees are all places where the United States has invaded, overthrown governments, supported insurgencies, or intervened in a civil war. The invasion of Iraq created a power vacuum that has empowered terrorism in the Arab heartland. Supporting rebels in Syria has piled Pelion on Ossa. Afghanistan continues to bleed 14 years after the United States arrived and decided to create a democracy. Libya, which was relatively stable when the U.S. and its allies intervened, is now in chaos, with its disorder spilling over into sub-Saharan Africa.

...Though I recognize that the refugee problem cannot be completely blamed on only one party, many of those millions would be alive and the refugees would for the most part be in their homes if it had not been for the catastrophic interventionist policies pursued by both Democratic and Republican administrations in the United States. [The American Conservative]
 
 
 
 

"The stranger who dwells among you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God." [Leviticus 19:34]

"'I will come near you for judgment; I will be a swift witness against sorcerers, against adulterers, against perjurers, against those who exploit wage earners and widows and orphans, and against those who turn away an alien — because they do not fear Me,' says the Lord of hosts." [Malachi 3:5]

"Then the King will say to those on His right hand, 'Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in; I was naked and you clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me.' Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, 'Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink? When did we see You a stranger and take You in, or naked and clothe You? Or when did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?' And the King will answer and say to them, 'Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.'" [Matthew 25:34-40] 
 
 

“We are not well served when, in response to a terrorist attack, we descend into fear and panic. We don’t make good decisions if it’s based on hysteria or an exaggeration of risks.

“When individuals say we should have a religious test and that only Christians, proven Christians should be admitted, that’s offensive.

“I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for Isil [Isis] than some of the rhetoric that’s been coming out of here during the course of this debate.

“Isil seeks to exploit the idea that there’s war between Islam and the west, and when you see individuals in positions of responsibility suggesting Christians are more worthy of protection than Muslims are in a war-torn land, that feeds the Isil narrative. It’s counter-productive. And it needs to stop.

“And I would add, these are the same folks who suggested they’re so tough that just ‘talk to Putin’ or staring down Isil [will work] … but they are scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America as part of our tradition of compassion. At first they were too scared of the press being too tough on them in the debates. Now they are scared of three-year-old orphans. That doesn’t seem so tough to me.”

     - Barak Obama
 
 
On 9/11 Donald Rumsfeld told his aides: “Sweep it up. Related and not,” and immediately suggested using the attack as an excuse to invade Iraq. The result was a disastrous war that actually empowered terrorists, and set the stage for the rise of ISIS.
- Paul Krugman, NY Times 
 
 
 
Ronald Reagan tripled the federal budget deficit. During his tenure, our national debt shot up to $3 trillion. Conservatives claim tax cuts grow the private sector and increase revenue, but Reagan tried this in his first year and the opposite occurred, which is why he raised taxes substantially the following year (and 10 other times over the course of his two terms). Unemployment also spiked to 10.8 percent shortly after Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts. Reagan gave amnesty to over 3 million undocumented immigrants. Reagan funded the Mujahidin fighters in Afghanistan, which later became the Taliban. Reagan vowed to shrink the size of government, but spending skyrocketed during his administrations.
 
 
Moral narcissism is about being more concerned with the cleanliness of your hands than with how your conduct shapes the lives around you.
 
 
 
The main debate was the usual tornado of nonsense.
- Jeb Lund on Republican debate, 11/10/2015
 
 
 
 
It’s widely assumed that bankers have special expertise on economic policy, although nothing in the record supports this belief. (The bankers do, however, have excellent tailors.)
Paul Krugman, NY Times 
 
 
 "That’s the fundamental flaw in the anti-GMO movement. It only pretends to inform you. When you push past its dogmas and examine the evidence, you realize that the movement’s fixation on genetic engineering has been an enormous mistake. The principles it claims to stand for—environmental protection, public health, community agriculture—are better served by considering the facts of each case than by treating GMOs, categorically, as a proxy for all that’s wrong with the world. That’s the truth, in all its messy complexity. Too bad it won’t fit on a label."
 
 
 
Reading on-screen tempts us to see things only through the pinhole of our immediate curiosity. I don’t mean to sentimentalize the Reading of Books, but as a practical matter, when you hold a book in your hands, it is very different from what happens when you are typing something onto a glassy, featureless screen. Online, your experience is personalized, but it is also atomized, flattened and miniaturized, robbed of its landscape. Physical books require you to literally hold some of the context of what you are reading, and that is a crucial dimension of understanding.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
When Clinton left office in January 2001, he gave America a projected $1.9 trillion surplus. By the time Bush handed the economy off to Obama in 2009, the Congressional Budget Office projected $1.2 trillion in debt, due largely to Bush’s $1.5 trillion in tax cuts to the wealthy, as well as the additional trillions spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
 
 
 
 
 
 
"When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous." (Luke 14:12-14).
 
 
 
 
When Reagan took office, he advocated fiscal responsibility, as his disciples do today. But his presidency was anything but responsible when it came to fiscal policies. The size of America’s debt when he entered office was $1 trillion, and by the end of his two terms, it had grown by 190 percent, to $2.9 trillion, nearly tripling under his leadership. By the the end of twelve years of Reagan-Bush administration, the debt had quadrupled to $4 trillion. Reagan’s policies were ideological in the beginning, and pragmatic towards the end. In his first year in office, he signed major tax cuts into law that were supposed to reduce revenue by $749 billion over five years. This was the “starve the beast” tactic, which the Reagan administration quickly realized was impractical, and the following year signed into law the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982, which was the largest tax increase in American history. For the remaining of his presidency, Reagan backtracked from that initial tax cut, increasing income taxes as well as gasoline and social security taxes, which he would use to fund his runaway spending.
 
 
 
 
When someone works for less pay than she can live on—when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently—then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The “working poor,” as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else. -- Barbara Ehrenreich
 
 
 
 
"Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy."
   -Ezekiel 16:49
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Fort Lewis College philosopher Justin McBrayer is a dimwit. ("Moral facts" destroyed by education, again.) 
 
 
"Eliminate all taxes, privatize everything, load a country up with guns and oppose all public expenditures, you end up with Honduras."
   -- Edwin Lyngar [more...]
 
 
"I feel sorry for Rudy [Giuliani] that he can't love this country the way it is. I love America even with assholes like him living in it. In fact, I'm immensely proud of our assholes; I think America has the best assholes in the world. I defy the Belgians or the Japanese to produce something like a Donald Trump. If that makes me an exceptionalist, I plead guilty."
-- Matt Taibbi 
 
 
 
Immigration Myths and Facts
 
   -- US Chamber of Commerce
 
 
 
 
Dietary Supplements
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
On "American Sniper": "At no point does the film consider the fact that the war was based on false justifications. At no point does it imagine that those in Iraq might have seen the U.S. soldiers as invaders in their homeland. At no point does it imagine that the violence suffered by our own soldiers could have been avoided if we simply hadn’t started the war to begin with."
    -- Sophia A. McClennen (read article)
 
 
 
 
"Sniper is a movie whose politics are so ludicrous and idiotic that under normal circumstances it would be beneath criticism. The only thing that forces us to take it seriously is the extraordinary fact that an almost exactly similar worldview consumed the walnut-sized mind of the president who got us into the war in question."
 
 
 
The poorest 20 percent of households pay more than twice the effective state and local tax rate (10.9 percent) as the richest 1 percent of taxpayers (5.4 percent). -- Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy
 
-- Michael Shermer
 
 
Stan Morgan, 12/24/14
 
 
 
 
 
 
My jaw hit the corner of my desk when I read last week that Ukraine’s new finance minister, one Natalie Jaresko, is 1) an American citizen, granted a Ukraine passport simultaneously with her cabinet appointment, 2) a former State Department officer, 3) recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars in that $5 billion Victoria Nuland famously bragged of spending in State’s effort to yank Ukraine westward and 4) a participant in apparently extensive insider dealing via the investment management company she co-founded after leaving State. -- Patrick L. Smith [More...]
 
 
 
The United States of Rich White America: Six armed police officers tackling and killing a man for selling a 75-cent cigarette.
 
 
 
 
"The best of journalism happens when we take a stand: when we question those who are in power, when we confront the politicians who abuse their authority, when we denounce an injustice. The best of journalism happens when we side with the victims, with the most vulnerable, with those who have no rights. The best of journalism happens when we, purposely, stop pretending that we are neutral and recognize that we have a moral obligation to tell truth to power." -- Jorge Ramos
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The Corporate State: Fleecing Uncle Sam
 
 
"We shall  not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger. We were strangers once, too."
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
What they pay and what they get in taxes from the Federal government:
 
 State  Pay  Get
 Mississippi  1.00  3.07
 Alaska  1.00  1.42
 Alabama  1.00  3.28
 Louisiana  1.00  3.35
 Indiana  1.00  2.01
 Montana  1.00  1.55
 South Carolina  1.00  1.92
 West Virginia  1.00  2.22
 Tennessee  1.00  1.64
 Kentucky  1.00  2.39
 
 
 
Dr. Stephanie Seneff  -
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
"You don't own a TV? What's all your furniture pointed at?"
-- Joey Tribbiani 
 
 
Thinking it through: Purpose? Method? Endstate?
 
 
 
 
"For every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides."
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
GMO (genetically modified organisms)
 
glyphosate (Roundup)
Monsanto - glyphosate-resistant crops ("Roundup Ready")
Similar resistance in some weed species has been seen.
It seems pretty clear that using this particular kind of GMO crop (resistant to glyphosphate) will encourage farmers to use more Roundup. This is an argument against a particular kind of GMO that makes sense
 
Dr. Mercola
Joseph M. Mercola is an alternative medicine proponent, osteopathic physician, and web entrepreneur, who markets a variety of controversial dietary supplements and medical devices through his website, mercola.com .
 
Many of Mercola's articles make unsubstantiated claims and clash with those of leading medical and public health organizations. For example, he opposes immunization, fluoridation, mammography, and the routine administration of vitamin K shots to the newborn; claims that amalgam fillings are toxic; and makes many unsubstantiated recommendations for dietary supplements. Mercola's reach has been greatly boosted by repeated promotion on the "Dr. Oz Show."
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Paul Ryan looks around, sees three unemployed workers for every job opening in America, and blames the people who can't find a job. In 2008, this economy crashed, wiping out millions of jobs. Paul Ryan says don't blame Wall Street: the guys who made billions of dollars cheating American families; don't blame decades of deregulation that took the cops off the beat while the big banks looted the American economy. Don't blame the Republican Secretary of the Treasury, and the Republican president who set in motion a no-strings-attached bailout for the biggest banks. Nope. Paul Ryan says keep the monies flowing to the powerful corporations, keep their huge tax breaks, keep the special deals for the too-big-to-fail banks and put the blame on hardworking, play-by-the-rules Americans who lost their jobs.
 
 
That may be Paul Ryan's vision of how America works, but that is not our vision of this great country.
 
-- Elizabeth Warren
 
 
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.
-- Matt Taibbi
 
 
 
 
The People vs. Goldman Sachs - by Matt Taibbi 
 
Looting Main Street  - by Matt Taibbi
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
If you've ever heard someone say, "Do what you love; love what you do.", you must read this
 
 
 
 
You don’t have to operate with a malicious spirit to do tremendous harm. Insensitivity and ignorance are sufficient.
   -- Charles Blow, ‘Duck Dynasty’ and Quackery 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
George W. Bush: I gave it my all, and I didn't sell my soul for the sake of popularity.
 
Jon Stewart: You didn't need to. You sold ours.
 
 
 
 
 
America is Number 1!
 "The America is No. 1 insanity, as likely to be perpetrated by Chris Matthews as Sean Hannity. I mean, No. 1 at what? Domestic spying? Fascist-adjacent governmental devotion to banks and business? Stripping its citizens of dignity, hope and food stamps? Letting industry poison the water and air? (Though that title might to go China, too.) I get particularly angry – now that I have a baby in the house again – about drones. Don’t the people who keep blowing up grandmothers in Afghanistan and Yemen and God knows where else realize that, one of these days, those poor bastards are going to start sending drones in our direction? And if they’re as random and inaccurate as ours, it’s not going to be pretty." -- Jerry Stahl
 
 
 
 
 
Words and phrases that should be destroyed:
impact
optics
leverage
narrative
double down
 
 
 
 
 
 
"If you can read an Ayn Rand book and not see through it as the comically pretentious horseshit that it is, nothing I or anyone else says is likely to change your mind." 
 
 
 
 
 A quote from George Carlin's "The American Dream":
 
"Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice . . . you don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own, and control the corporations. They've long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying . . . lobbying, to get what they want . . . Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don't want . . . they don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that . . . that doesn't help them. That's against their interests. That's right. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin' years ago. They don't want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers . . . Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they're coming for your Social Security money. They want your fuckin' retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They'll get it . . . they'll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fuckin' place. It's a big club and you ain't in it. You and I are not in The big club. By the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people . . . white collar, blue collar it doesn't matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means . . . continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don't give a fuck about you. They don't give a fuck about you . . . they don't give a fuck about you. They don't care about you at all . . . at all . . . at all, and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. That's what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth. It's called the American Dream cause you have to be asleep to believe it ... "
 
 
 
 
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