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Category Archives: Propaganda

Dec 15 2021
Cassandra, COVID-19, Diary, Immoral Values, Propaganda, Stupid Republican Tricks, Uncategorized

Two Years and Counting of Magical Thinking

BERJAYA

Back in February I wrote about the US passing the 500,000 mark in people who died from Covid. Today we crossed the 800,000 mark, and there is no end in sight to the unnecessary death.

I tweeted this a few days ago:  “Everyone wants to report back who died, but far fewer people want to talk about grief.” I was actually talking about the Sex and the City reboot “And Just Like That”, but it fits the real world, too. Even if you have not lost a loved one to Covid, the grief is palpable everywhere.

In this moment as a country we don’t do grief well. Part of the Trump plan to ignore Covid was to convince a significant percentage of the nation to be indifferent to mass death. So at first we were told that it was just old people who were dying and they’d already lived long lives and so were expendable. I read this over and over from right wingers on the politics board I frequent. It’s disgusting.

As the virus started mainly killing groups other than the elderly, the narrative shifted. See, the people who were dying were overweight, or unhealthy in ways that are socially undesirable, so the shitty morality play that passes for conservatism in the US deemed them expendable too, and therefore not deserving of mourning.

The same went for people fighting cancer, or who have compromised immune systems. If they were in such danger from the disease then they should just stay home. And if they died, it wasn’t a big deal because it was their own fault for leaving their homes.

As young people and children got sick, and died, the same people told us that there were very few children who were getting sick and most of them weren’t dying, so what was the big deal? I don’t have children but a lot of the people who were telling me that kids sick from Covid wasn’t a big deal did. I’m kind of a dummy at times, because I really believed that sick kids would finally move the needle. But it didn’t and to be honest, I don’t think a lot of these people would care if their own child were seriously ill with Covid.

So over the last 2 years “you’re old”, “you’re sick in a socially unacceptable way”, “you’re selfish for wanting me to have to sacrifice to keep you healthy”, and “it’s only a few kids” have become a magical thinking mantra to the Covid and vaccine deniers.

I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking when it came out in 2005. I don’t know why. I am not a particular fan of hers. I wasn’t married. I hadn’t faced the death of a romantic partner. But somehow I was drawn to it anyway.

There are some books you can’t reread because they strike such a deep chord in you that can’t uncross that river. TYOMT is one of mine. (The book that hit me the hardest is Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go as every page of that book is tinged with profound grief, yet I could not stop reading it.)

Didion’s grief is refined and almost abstract, but it’s also very clearly devastating. I still admire her for being so clear about something we all shy away from:

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”

Mostly I was drawn to TYOMT because of its reference to magical thinking. The American Psychological Association defines magical thinking as “The belief that events or the behavior of others can be influenced by one’s thoughts, wishes, or rituals. Magical thinking is typical of children up to 4 or 5 years of age, after which reality thinking begins to predominate.”

The Covid and vaccine deniers have been wallowing in magical thinking:  “It’ll only happen to old people/overweight people/selfish people who want me to wear a mask/a few kids”. Every day you read a story about an anti-vaxxer who is dying a slow, painful death from Covid surrounded by a family who is shell-shocked to learn that they have been lied to by people they trusted.

If you are mired in magical thinking, you cannot address your grief. And if you don’t address your grief, you won’t see how other people are grieving, and you won’t be motivated to fix the underlying problem.

We are all working through the unimaginable.

Dec 06 2021
4 Comments
Campaign Notes, Jamie O, Propaganda

Would My Home State Really Elect Dr. Oz?

D

Dr. Oz in a moment where he was not in Kansas anymore (this is the only Wizard of Oz pun in this post, I promise).

I love my home state (or actually, commonwealth). Pennsylvania is a good place to live. We have two wonderful cities; if you have jokes about Philadelphia and Pittsburgh as dumps, all you’re telling me is you are basing that on old information. There are beautiful natural areas, and many of the denizens are friendly.

However, we are of course not immune from making bad decisions. Trump won our state, for example. We had Rick Santorum as our senator. And now we have an opportunity to make another awful decision – Hearthrob Snakeoil Salesman Dr. Oz has thrown his hat in the ring for the Pennsylvania senator race.

Mehmet Oz (his real name) somehow became a “trusted medical voice.” Well, not somehow…the only somehow here is he managed to hoodwink an obviously smart woman, Oprah Winfrey, into being his salesperson. Not to pick on Oprah, as Dr. Oz has a successful show himself.

It’s not like he fooled everyone. In fact, there were people trying to tell us he’s a quack for years.

He is running, of course, as a Republican. He has the Republican bonafides. For example, he said this:

I certainly hope that Democratic operatives are all over that. Although I doubt it swings many Republicans, and sorry, our recent nonchalance stance toward death that seems to be coming from independents makes me wonder if it would work as well as we would hope.

In his announcement, Dr. Oz said this:

“During the pandemic, I learned that when you mix politics and medicine, you get politics instead of solutions. That’s why I am running for the U.S. Senate: to help fix the problems and to help us heal.”

Okay, first, come here…let me have your ear so I can tell you something:

THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO INJECTED POLITICS INTO MEDICINE DURING THE PANDEMIC WERE REPUBLICANS, THE DEMOCRATS WERE (AND ARE) SAYING EXACTLY WHAT YOUR DAMN FAMILY DOCTOR WAS (AND IS) SAYING – GET VACCINATED AND WEAR YOUR MASK.

That said, what exactly Oz has in mind as far as “fixing problems and helping us heal,” of course, he isn’t clear about. He’s obviously going to run the Virginia governor election playbook, sounding like the reasonable uniter, who gosh darn it wants everyone to heal. Because he’s a doctor! Get it? Meanwhile, he’d let the right-wing fever swamp on social media and right-wing “regular” media do the dirty work.

I have no idea whether any of this will work. No doubt in the primary one of his opponents will use his Muslim faith against him, and he will likely attempt to explain he is not one of those Muslims. He will likely go full throttle on bad COVID ideas, and I wouldn’t be stunned if that would work. Philadelphia suburban voters will see him as one of them, and his tenuous connections to Pennsylvania are all in that region.

But surely a complete quack wouldn’t be elected to Congress, right? What, are you a comedian? My goodness, they could create an entire Quack Caucus.

Oz is no dummy. In fact, I do not believe he himself is a full proponent of kooky medical supplements and potions. I believe he is a proponent of being wealthy as hell. He obviously fooled a lot of smart people. For example, watch the John Oliver clip above, you will see Joe and Mika of Morning Joe SWOONING over Dr. Oz, even after seeing his Senate testimony where he was exposed as a charlatan. He probably owes Oprah a sales commission for hawking his stuff. And remember, Libertarian Frat Bro Paul Ryan was treated as a Reasoned Conservative Voice, even with his economic ideas being complete nonsense, because he made them sound good.

We’ll see how this plays out. The last TV personality to win a national office didn’t work out so well, so fingers crossed he flames out.

The last word goes to Ray Charles – I hope my fellow Pennsylvanians think this if Oz is the GOP nominee.

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Nov 16 2021
Business, Economy, Elections, Propaganda, Shapiro

Perception Is Reality

Fox News $7.59/gal Gas

There is a bit of a kerfuffle going on right now over inflation.

Some say it is the only issue the country should be grappling with. Others say that the fear of inflation is overblown and not nearly as important as say climate change or voting rights. As prices rise and wages do not the public is becoming fearful of being able to make ends meet.  When the public is fearful, the political party in power tends to be blamed for it.

Especially when the other party’s propaganda wing harps on it to the exclusion of pretty much all other news.

My personal favorite of the Faux News Factless Fatuousness is the $7.59 a gallon California gas station. Let’s take a look at that story. Don’t worry, that link doesn’t take you to Faux News, I have a greater respect for my readership than to pull a stunt like that. At any rate it turns out the $7.59 per gallon gas at exactly ONE gas station in the remote coastal town of Gorda comes from the fact that the station only receives one shipment every couple of  weeks and pays the highest cost per gallon for gas delivery in the country and because, yeah, if you are nearing empty in that remote coastal town and the next gas station is at least two or three gallons away you’ll pay whatever you have to in order to buy a couple of gallons. The proprietor also reports that he rarely sells a full tankful which also forces him to have a higher price.

Economics 101. It’s called supply and demand.

Now yes we do have the highest cost of gas in the country as I have discussed before, but guess what? We here in liberal, blue, Democratic California have the highest wages in the country. You know those ads for Amazon where they tout how they pay a minimum of $15 per hour and then cut to a shot of cheering warehouse employees? That’s our minimum wage. I don’t see FedEx running ads showing their warehouse employees cheering their $7.25 per hour Tennessee minimum wage.

But let’s get back to inflation. Repugnicants want to harp on it because they see it as the issue that will get white, no college, women to flock to them in 2022.

Here’s the thing. They’re right.

Repugnicants have always been the winning party when they can get two things: their base to vote, and the undecideds to swing their way. Undecideds may be too bored to have an opinion, but they vote based on the one issue that people SHOULD be basing their vote on, their pocketbook. If a gallon of gas is double what it was four years ago, somebody has to pay for that rapid escalation. Especially when it’s somebody who is negotiating climate deals that will save the planet, but make gas even more expensive.

Leaving a habitable planet for your kids and grandkids is a nice concept, but putting food on the table right now is much more important to those folks.

So Democrats, if you want to keep your majority in Congress and maybe even make that majority solid enough to tell Senators Manchinnychinchin and Semolina to go fold it five ways and stick it where the sun don’t shine you might want to listen to the concerns of those white non college educated females.

And then you might want to weaponize what they tell you.

Play the Repugnicants’ game. They are always taking issues and surrounding them in a fog of unrepentant propaganda, how about you do the same? But here’s the thing, you can use the truth as a weapon.

Wow, what a concept.

The truth is that inflation is keyed by one product and one product alone. It’s the only product that all other products have to use in one way or another. When it’s price rises, all other prices rise to ameliorate that increase. And what product is that?

I’ll give you three guesses, but I think you’ll only need one.

Click Click Click the link below to find out what it is

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Nov 15 2021
1 Comment
Big Damn Heroes, Bigotry, Jamie O, Propaganda, Race

Dear White Conservatives: Stop It With The MLK Lying

 

BERJAYA

Martin Luther King Jr. leading a Poor People’s Campaign march demanding more to be done to end poverty, which, you know, is a very conservative thing to do.

Americans continue to their mind over critical race theory, led by the Reasoned Very Serious Middle, a nest of punditry that seems to believe that being a centrist means occasionally Tweeting “tsk-tsk” about something Trump did while mostly demonstrating a deep hatred of liberals and progressives. Plus, for being the Bastions of Reason, they often demonstrate a tenuous grasp of history.

A fine recent example of this is a piece over the weekend by Reasoned Conservative Marc Thiessen of the Washington Post, who raged about critical race theory, again, and did a very common thing that so many white conservatives do: bastardized the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. Michael Harriot, writer with The Root who is pretty much done playing around with your dumb ass, called him on it:

As someone who is in the Native community, this sort of thing is all too familiar. White Americans, as a whole, love to soil the history and memory of people they used to fight. It’s a whole cottage industry. Native Americans doing things like protesting pipelines hear laments of non-Natives demanding they be the Mystical Savage of the movies.

With Dr. King, it’s incredibly bad.

Each MLK Day, you have a litany of conservatives who take advantage of the moment for some gaslighting. They tsk-tsk modern Black activists for “not being more like Dr. King,” which means being more like this bizarre recreation of King created in one of Lee Atwater’s fever dreams. The idea of MLK that these professional liars create bears little resemblance to the real Dr. King. Take a look at a few of these more common lies about the man:

– King was never argued America was systematically racist: Harriot nicely buries Thiessen’s claim that King never believed that America was poisoned by racism. King certainly did believe America had a systematic race problem. He wrote about how “everyone must share in the guilt as individuals and as institutions.”

– King was a beloved figure because he didn’t push things “too far.”: This is demonstrably not true. Gallup found that two-thirds of Americans disliked him, and some polls found that number to be as high as nearly 75%. The irony of this is the people making this claim no doubt would be one of the ones who hated him. The reason he was hated is due to some things that have been whitewashed by history, which leads me to…

– King was actually a conservative: This is a mind-boggling, but fairly common claim. Just looking at the next project he was about to launch in earnest before he was killed, the Poor People’s Project. Pretty much, the best way to describe King was a democratic socialist. In fact, a big reason for King’s unpopularity was people believing he was a communist.

– King opposed affirmative action: Conservatives love love love to take King’s words out of context, so they use a line from his most famous speech to claim he was anti-affirmative-action: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Curiously enough, they ignore quotes like: “If a city has a 30% Negro population, then it is logical to assume that Negroes should have at least 30% of the jobs in any particular company, and jobs in all categories rather than only in menial areas.” Or “a society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro.” Not really an anti-affirmative-action stance?

And so it goes now with critical race theory. Barry Deutsch brilliantly skewers this approach here.

After a while, it becomes harder and harder to not see these people as being nothing more than dishonest.

The last word goes to Stevie Wonder, who recognized King’s legacy in one song better than 100,000 conservatives ever will:

 

Tagged , ,
Nov 03 2021
1 Comment
Campaign Notes, Cassandra, Elections, Immoral Values, Political Crack, Propaganda, Race, Stupid Republican Tricks

It’s the Racism, Stupid

BERJAYA

As I write this it looks like Glenn Youngkin is going to be the next governor of Virginia. The Democratic Party’s recriminations are of course in full swing. Let’s end all the nonsense:  it’s the racism, stupid.

Don’t get me wrong:  Terry McAuliffe was a terrible candidate but nothing in this campaign season was about policy. Our broadcast TV stations are from the Washington, DC market, so I saw ALL of Youngkin’s campaign ads. His only issue was racism and he was helped by a ginned-up astroturf protest movement against the fictional teaching of critical race theory in public schools. You’ve probably already seen the articles.

“Critical Race Theory” is the “Let’s Go Brandon” of the GOP’s campaign strategy. It’s a cowardly code name for something ugly and vulgar. And as we saw tonight, it works in places where there are a lot of racists. To wit:

And as Democrats begin their postmortem of the Virginia election, “it’s the racism, stupid” has got to be kept at the forefront of any discussion. Racism is a drug and many white Americans can’t get enough of it.

A lot of the carping I saw tonight from Democrats focused on the ongoing negotiations on the reconciliation human infrastructure bill and blamed both progressive Democrats and conservative Democrats. This is a bad take. Why? Because it’s the racism, stupid.

This is a good take:

So is this:

I haven’t agreed with him in a long time, but he’s absolutely right:

Democrats have a much bigger problem to solve before November 2022:

I have no answers, just questions:

OK, I lied. I do have one answer:  white voters are a lost cause and Democrats should stop thinking that they are the end-all and be-all for voters and candidates.

R.E.M. and Dan Rather can sing us out:

Oct 06 2021
Cassandra, Immoral Values, Political Crack, Propaganda, So Called Liberal Media, The Darnold

The War on Reality

BERJAYA

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m an active, longtime member in a politics forum that draws a mixture of liberals and conservatives. The community has moved with its parent forum to different hosts, and then spun off as a stand-alone forum after TFG was elected. It was a lively place which died because of staff indifference to updating the software, a glitch that meant no one could sign up for 4 years, and the wholesale retreat of every right winger over the summer of 2020 as the signs of TFG’s impending loss because visible.

The community has migrated back to a space on the parent board, which means that there is a fresh crop of right wingers to contend with. I have to say that there is one constant with these people, and that is that they are irretrievably stupid. If I had to compare their sheer stupidity to a natural phenomenon, it would be a black hole. Nothing intelligent comes out of them, and to get to close to them is to have all of the intelligence sucked out of you.

Still, it’s fun to toy with them because they say some unintentionally hilarious things. Plus if you get them mad enough, they end up getting suspended because instead of going for a simple insult like “stupid”, they have to go straight for sexual slurs and gendered insults. Some of the slightly smarter ones stick to sexist language which keeps them off the suspension list until one of the women mods comes across their posts and then they get a vacation. (Also imagine me earnestly responding to them and warning them that they are going to get suspended if they keep it up and their doubling down in response to my very good advice. Believe me, I have earned the title of Cassandra.)

So I’ve been reading today about the debt ceiling impasse and so of course I started a discussion about it. A flurry of wingers began responding to me, and when I brought the discussion down to the most basic level—what is the debt ceiling?—none of them could answer the question. None of them. But they could tell me that no politician cares about any of us and that they have plenty of money and if the US fails to raise the debt limit, all of those politicians would be fine.

This is the level of political discourse in this country—a chunk of Americans don’t think they need to spend any time at all learning about current events, but instead spend that time repeating stuff that isn’t true and which, because of its underlying nihilism, further decreases their desire to educate themselves about current events. So they ask less and less from journalists, and journalists tailor their work to this bunch of lazy nihilists.

If your audience will believe anything because they’re incapable of critical thought and disinclined to fact check their prejudices, then why spend time trying to educate them? Why not entertain them while feeding them a false narrative that they will happily internalize? For example if you’re The View, you invite Alyssa Farah, one of the biggest propagandists on the Trump administration’s paywall, on to sell her lies. And boom! an insurrectionist enabler goes mainstream.

The other propagandist who got a bunch of air time last week was Stephanie Grisham, who openly admitted that she just lied to all of us whenever she felt like it, and that she carefully managed TFG’s press appearances in order to maximize his propaganda push. All of this is being sold to us totally normal.

It’s not. The 1/6 insurrection is still ongoing. Those of us who are still able to think for ourselves have to double our efforts to make sure that truth is promoted and that lies are marginalized. Hillary Clinton addressed this this week:

I hope she’s right.

Aimee Mann gets the last word:

Sep 24 2021
2 Comments
Art, Donald Trump Is, Elections, Law/Justice, Propaganda, Shapiro, Television

We Don’t Need Another Hero

Marvel's Avengers

 

A couple of weeks ago I changed my cell phone plan which these days means I get access to more of the interconnected corporate hegemony being put out into the cultural zeitgeist these days. In this case I now have access to Disney Plus, or Disney + as the branding bros would have it.

I really couldn’t have cared less about getting Disney + as I am beyond the age of having children who would watch cartoons and not yet to the point of having grandkids who would. But since Disney has been buying up intellectual property as if they couldn’t possibly come up with something themselves (and yes that is a dig at how Disney has treated their creative “partners”) having the network has given me a chance to take a gander at the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) that I’ve heard so much about.

I have a special fondness for Marvel comic books. Back in the day when a 25 cent weekly allowance was enough for two comics and three pieces of penny candy, I bucked the trends and fanboyed for Marvel over D.C. Comics. Frankly I didn’t understand why my friends didn’t favor The Fantastic Four over Superman or Spiderman over Batman. I mean, we lived in New York, the Marvel characters protected New York, why would you favor some guy from another planet who lived in a made up city called Metropolis over someone protecting YOU in the very real city where you lived? And really, this guy puts on a pair of glasses and nobody recognizes him? At least Iron Man had a metal helmet covering his entire head so of course you couldn’t know it was Tony Stark.

But times passes and my magazine reading advanced from comic books to Mad Magazine to the National Lampoon and then out into adulthood. Yeah, I went to see Christopher Reeve as Superman and Michael Keaton as Batman, but those were one off experiences that were not repeated for the numerous sequels. By the time of the reimagining of Batman by Christopher Nolan, superhero movies were out of my flightpath. In fact I became that guy who went to see Cosmopolis at some Hellplaza 64 screen monstrosity and complained to the management that the walls are so thin I could hear the cheering for The Dark Knight Rises.

Damn kids.

Thus I have not seen in their entirety any of the twenty-five or so movies that have made zillions of dollars and have audiences salivating for more. I don’t know Chris Evans from Chris Pine. I’ve been told they are both captains, but of what I can’t remember. Scrolling through the list of Marvel films available on the network I get lost trying to remember if Loki is a villain, a hero, a god, a spaceman, or just whatever the hell he really is. Apparently there are multiple universes in which there are multiple Spidermen, women, dogs, cats, and taxi cab drivers. And there are guardians of the galaxy and one of them is the shoeshine guy from Parks and Rec?

And to think one of the reasons my childhood friends didn’t like the Marvel comics was that they were too complex.

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Sep 11 2021
1 Comment
Big Damn Heroes, Cassandra, Diary, Do Something, Immoral Values, Propaganda, So Called Liberal Media, Terrorism, War in Afghanistan, War in Iraq

9/11:  History in a Vacuum

BERJAYA

I never watch any 9/11 anniversary television coverage. I was in DC on 9/11 and for all of the months after it. I watched the Pentagon burn from the roof of my office building, just a few blocks from the White House. It was a terrifying day and I’m not here to relive it.

But Americans love to relive it. And somehow the round number of 20 has ramped up coverage to take over this entire week. We should absolutely remember those who died and the bravery and selflessness of the first responders who risked and gave their lives so others could live. We should remember the family members left behind.

The 9/11 commemorations always happen in a vacuum. One moment the United States is minding their own business going about a Tuesday, and the next moment the nation is under attack. It’s treated as if the country were sucker punched on the street for no discernible reason.

When you remove 9/11 from its previous context it becomes a cheap way for people who never put their lives on the line, ever, to spend the run up to it and the day itself policing how people feel about it and making it into some kind of patriotic holiday. But it’s the removal of the post 9/11 context that does the most damage.

9/11 was the result of complete carelessness by the Bush administration which was tight with the Bin Laden family to the point of getting them out of the country to shield them from having to provide necessary information. It was the excuse for the Bush administration to launch a war in Afghanistan so they and their cronies could make billions, and then to launch another, even more pointless war in Iraq, to further enrich people like Eric Prince, where the United States committed war crimes.

And it was all sold to us as a triumphant exercise of democracy, and if you opposed it you were asked “what is wrong with you?” I just got asked this question yesterday when someone asked me about 9/11 and I told them the stuff I’ve written here.

Well fuck all that. 9/11 should be a day of introspection and apology to the first responders left without medical care. It should be a day of thanks and asking forgiveness of the men and women who went to Afghanistan and Iraq and came back with mental and physical injuries. It should be a day to apologize to the families who lost people, in the towers, the Pentagon, in PA, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and who were left to fend with cancer and other illnesses after their service and sacrifice. It should be a day to castigate those member of Congress who refused to fund healthcare for first responders.

And it should be a day to do some serious work on beating our swords into plowshares.

Aug 18 2021
3 Comments
Afghanistan, Cassandra, Immoral Values, JOEY B SHARK, Propaganda, So Called Liberal Media, Stupid Republican Tricks, War in Afghanistan, War in Iraq

 I Won’t Forget

BERJAYA

Our fearless leader has written 2 thorough and excellent pieces about the Afghanistan War and how we got where we are. If you haven’t read them, please do:  here and here. I have some thoughts, too.

There sure are a lot of familiar faces on the TeeVee over the last few days, blathering on about Afghanistan and tut-tutting over President Biden’s decision to get the hell out of, well, hell. They seem to think they have a blank slate for selling their snake oil. Well, I remember who they are and what they did.

In 1990, Iraq annexed Kuwait and we were supposed to feel it was justified because Kuwaiti women weren’t allowed to drive. Hey, it was going to be awesome! The US was going to beat back these sexist bullies and Kuwaiti women would be able to drive!

In reality there was no reason for the US to go to war with Iraq. But there was plenty of incentive for the Saudi-loving Bush family to protect their monster friends’ oilfields which were close enough for the invading Iraq army to take over. And so the propaganda machine took over. A DC public relations firm, Hill & Knowlton, funded by the Kuwaiti government, began pumping out disinformation to convince Congress to authorize war.

The nadir of the lying was the Congressional testimony of a nurse who said she saw Iraqi soldiers take babies out of incubators and throw them on the floor. This was all it took to convince Congress to go to war. The truth was that she was a member of the Kuwaiti royal family lying and playing a role. But the damage was done.

George H.W. Bush set a deadline of midnight January 16, 1991 for US demands to be met. On the evening of January 16 I attended an interfaith peace service at National Cathedral that culminated in a silent candlelit protest walk to the White House. Houses along Massachusetts Avenue had candles in their windows, and residents stood in their front yards holding candles in solidarity. Of course it didn’t work. But I won’t forget what happened.

The Iraq War was advanced by even more egregious lies and a news media drunk on ratings. Taking their cue from CNN’s non-stop coverage of the Gulf War, this time all of the networks threw in big time. And the Republicans had upped their propaganda approach:  instead of a Kuwaiti royal playacting to tug on the heartstrings of unsophisticated rubes, this time the government made sure reporters got to go play soldier, complete with flak jackets and Jeep rides with the troops. War was exciting! There were big guns!

I didn’t buy any of it. Just like in 1991, I wholly opposed this war because it was all fake news. I took a lot of crap for telling the truth then but the Iraq War was wrong. It was founded on lies related to the 9/11 attacks and it was sustained by media outlets who put profit over truth. And eventually the whole house of cards collapsed.

Now that Biden has taken the steps to end 30 fucking years of wars built on lies, fought by other people’s sons and daughters and designed to make money for people who are already obscenely wealthy, all sorts of stuck pigs are squealing. A bunch of cowards who won’t make their names public are whispering to reporters at the outlets that are the most complicit in repeating the propaganda of rich people with power—CNN, Politico, Axios—about how it’s not their fault. Multiple sources looking to cover their asses after they put their fingerprints all over the Afghanistan fiasco are now bleating self-interested lies to organizations that love to uncritically print pre-digested GOP talking points.

People who perpetuate lies are always angry when their lies are uncovered and they will scramble to drown out the truth by making more noise. I’ll let Jack Mirkinson have the last paragraph as he excoriates some of the worst people liberals made heroes by not thinking critically enough during the Trump years:

But too many in our media cannot seem to admit this, and too many outlets are rolling out the red carpet for the usual gallery of unrepentant hawks. In the Washington Post, Max Boot called the withdrawal “the worst U.S. foreign policy failure since the fall of Saigon in 1975,” which would be news to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the Iraq War, and wondered (yet again) why the U.S. couldn’t just keep troops in Afghanistan forever. NPR decided it was a good idea to ask John Bolton what he thought. In the Atlantic, Tom Nichols told readers, “Afghanistan is your fault,” castigating the American people for demanding an end to the war:

Biden was right, in the end, to bite the bullet and refuse to pass this conflict on to yet another president. His execution of this resolve, however, looks to be a tragic and shameful mess and will likely be a case study in policy schools for years to come. But there was no version of “Stop the forever war” that didn’t end with the fall of Kabul. We believed otherwise, as a nation, because we wanted to believe it. And because we had shopping to do and television to watch and arguments to be had on social media.

So Biden was right to end the war but Americans are still the villains because we care about shopping. Makes sense. Maybe what is happening is the fault of the people who have presided over this calamity for 20 years?

The last word goes to Depeche Mode:

Jul 23 2021
2 Comments
COVID-19, Current Affairs, Propaganda, Shapiro, Television

Kevin And Karen Can F*%K Themselves

Kevin Can F Himself

You know, for a nice Canadian gal she sure has a habit of picking titles that are potty mouthed

My new favorite TV show is called Kevin Can F*%K Himself. If you don’t know, the premise of the show is that that main character, Allison, lives in two different television realities. In the brightly lit multi-camera sitcom world she is the perpetually put upon wife of the titular man child character. Think Leah Remini in The King Of Queens. In the other darker single camera world she is a woman on the edge of a nervous, potentially homicidal, breakdown ready to do anything to escape the hell that her husband has made of her life. Think Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad. The combination of the two is a phenomenal deconstruction of both styles. I’m particularly drawn to the point it makes about how situations perceived as benign one way are tragic in another.

Which brings me to vaccines. In particular, the COVID 19 vaccine.

Let me just begin by saying that if you are a Kevin or a Karen who still hasn’t gotten the vaccine, you can go f*#k yourself. I don’t want to hear your excuses. I don’t want to hear about how the FDA hasn’t fully approved it (this is an emergency dickwad and it was approved for emergency use so f**k you use it). I don’t want to hear about how you HEARD it might mess with your DNA (no more than that six pack of Coors before dinner every night does and probably a lot less). I don’t want to hear about how you’re just being cautious and once the science comes in you’ll decide from there (like you care about science or could even read a scientific report let alone understand it). And if you say but people who have been vaccinated have still tested positive for COVID I swear I will punch your lights out. Learn what that really means. If you want this pandemic to be over there is only one way for that to happen and it’s for everyone to get the vaccine.

So f*^k you if you haven’t gotten it.

We had it beat. We were starting to reopen, to get back to normal, to come out on the other side. All you had to do was get the jab, once for J&J, twice for the others. The first day I was eligible I made an appointment to get it. More importantly the wife (Cruella) made an appointment to get it as well. Put a pin in that point, we’ll come back to it after the jump.

On June 15 California declared that anyone who was vaccinated could go without a mask, not have to observe social distancing, and in general get back to life as we knew it. Last week many counties in California were forced to reintroduce those precautions because the Delta variant, which it has been shown the vaccine protects against, has spiked here and across the country. Who’s getting sick? Not those of us vaccinated. Only those who are not. In other words, those of us who did what we were asked to do, what we were pleaded with to do, now have to go back to Pandemic Days because little Karen Kouldn’t Kare with her degree in epidemiology from the University of Fox News has to be kept alive and well.

I’ll do it, cause I’m just that kind of community minded person, but Karen can go f##k herself.

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Jul 13 2021
1 Comment
Business, Education, Propaganda, Shapiro, Stupid Republican Tricks, Web/Tech

A Victim of FOFO

Prince George At Euro 2020 Final

I feel for ya kid. If my dad made me wear a suit and tie to a sporting event AND my team lost I’d be pissed too.

A few years ago a new acronym entered the lexicon- FOMO. It stands for Fear Of Missing Out, the notion that because via our phones we can see in real time events our friends and relations are engaging in we are somehow missing out on those events by not actually being there.

This past Sunday I became a victim of FOFO. Like FOMO, FOFO involves our relationship with technology and the toys that bring the tech to our fingertips. But FOFO isn’t about missing out on something, it’s about the active desire to not want to know something. FOFO stands for Fear Of Finding Out.

The particular event this relates to was the final of the Euro Cup Soccer Tournament between England (the good guys) and Italy (the less good guys). Out here on the Left Coast the match began at noon. I could not watch it then. There was business to attend to, business that would not be finished till well after the end of the game. No problem thought I. I would simply record the game, avoid any information about what happened in the game, and watch it in pure unadulterated sports ignorance bliss when I got home.

And that’s when I encountered FOFO.

It might not be a big deal here in the US of A, but the Euro Cup IS a big deal everywhere else in the world. While I had disabled all the alerts I have for sports stories and even went to the extent of disabling alerts from news organizations on the off chance a score would find it’s way to my binging phone, I so wanted to know nothing of the match in order to better enjoy it via tape delay that I took to not even looking at my phone the entire afternoon.

That’s a lot more difficult than you would think. I didn’t miss out on anything really important, but every time there was a vibration and a bing in my pocket (is that a bing in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?) I felt I had to ignore it on the oft chance it might contain information I didn’t want to know.

And suddenly I understood the Fox News viewer better than I ever have.

While I didn’t want to know who scored or what team was ahead, the Fox News viewer doesn’t want to get information from any other source on the oft chance he or she might have their preconceived notions of right and wrong challenged. Their FOFO is directly connected to their own self image or perhaps to the lack of same.

Their FOFO is so strong that their elected officials are taking them up on it. January 6th? Never heard of it. Did something happen that day? I just remember there being a lot more than usual tourists traipsing through the building. No big deal.

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Jul 06 2021
Bigotry, Business, Current Affairs, Immoral Values, Propaganda, Shapiro

Jesus Was Born On The Fourth Of July

Hobby Lobby July 4 Ad

I’ve spent a good amount of my life in the retail sector.

My parents owned retail stores. I worked in them from the time I was old enough to make correct change. For many years I owned retail stores, a case of the apple not falling far from the tree. Or maybe I was just too lazy to learn another way of making a living. Whatever.

One thing I learned is that it’s bad business to discuss politics or religion with a customer. No matter if they hold the same beliefs as yourself or if they are diametrically opposed to your own beliefs, bringing up those subjects is a certain way to make sure their money never ends up putting food on your table.

I also learned never to congratulate a woman on her pregnancy till SHE mentioned it. That’s another story.

The point is that in retail you smile a lot, eat your personal feelings, and make the sale.

Which brings us to our topic for the day, Hobby Lobby and their insulting 4th of July advertisement.  

Now we all know Hobby Lobby is as Christian conservative as you can get. You have to be to take it all the way to the Supreme Court just to get out of paying for your female employees’ reproductive health care. But to state with such impunity that you believe the United States of America was founded to be a Christian nation and live under the dogma of the Protestant Christian Church, well that’s as meshuge as you can get.

As I have stated before I am an atheist. If you want to believe that is fine with me, but we both live in the land of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and nowhere in that sobriquet does it mention Jesus of Nazareth. Nor is he mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or any other of the founding documents. Do they mention god? Yes they do, especially that first amendment that says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. As a matter of fact it’s the first sentence in the first amendment. And god or a creator or a divine being is not mentioned at all in the main body of the Constitution. I guess the founding fathers really had a thing about wanting to make sure that government and church were kept apart.

Hobby Lobby’s ad wasn’t even a plea for bringing god into political discourse. If it was I’d dismiss it as a waste of some true believer’s money. What it was was a declaration that this particular form of worship, and only this form, is the founding principle of the USA.

Representative government, the will of the people, the enshrinement of liberty and freedom as the cornerstone tenets of the nation, all that goes out the window. According to them, America was founded to be a playground for the true Christian believers. Not even the original believers are good enough; Catholics need not apply. And Jews? I’m sure Hobby Lobby would approve of the answer I once got from a bible thumper when I mentioned Jesus was born Jewish. “Well sure, but then he got smart and converted”.

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Jun 11 2021
1 Comment
Propaganda, Shapiro, Travel

Why We Travel

Mark Twain on Travel

During World War II the Antifa government of the United States commissioned their great factory of propaganda called Hollywood to produce a series of films called WHY WE FIGHT. These films were the product of the best and the brightest of American cinema; written by the Epstein brothers of CASABLANCA fame, scored by the dean of film music Alfred Newman, shot by the father of the documentary Robert Flahtery, and directed by three time Academy Award winner Frank Capra. They told in a simple and easy to understand style the reasons America was in the war. In fact they were so good the Feds decided the films, which were made for the troops, should be released to the general public.

I think we need the Biden Administration to underwrite a new series of films for our times. Maybe have them star all the Marvel superheroes, they’re popular. Call the series WHY WE TRAVEL. And then get people to travel.

63% of Americans don’t have a passport. Most say they don’t need one because they don’t see themselves leaving the country…ever. Some though say they don’t feel the government should be mandating “papers” for citizens. That might account for why 43% of Americans are against the idea of a vaccine passport. Of course most of them don’t have a driver’s license either. Sarcasm.

Personally I’ve held a passport for 40 years. My oldest ones are filled with entry and exit stamps from countries around the world, some that don’t even exist anymore, some where travel by Americans was limited. I’m actually peeved now when an immigration official doesn’t have one of the old “ker-thump” style hand stamps that rattle the desk with an imprimatur of official recognition. Hell, the Swiss don’t even stamp your passport at all, your comings and goings simply noted via barcode scan sent to a central computer deep inside an Alpine mountain.

Or some goatherder’s hut on top of the mountain. The Swiss, whatcha gonna do?

Travel broadens your horizons as the saying goes. As Sam/Mark says above, it’s hard to stay bigoted about someone once you’ve seen their home. Strongly held beliefs tend to wither away in the face of actual experience. Being in the Soviet Union in 1986 gave me greater understanding of Gorbachev’s Glasnost plans and why they had to be implemented. Walking the streets of Havana is truly the only way to understand the resilience of the Cuban people. Spending an hour in a pub in Belfast brings the knowledge that though tempered, The Troubles are far from over. Exploring the back alleys of the old city of Jerusalem made me realize that all this bloodshed, all these tears, all this drama, is over a bunch of rocks.

In that same vein I highly encourage anyone who is anti-immigration to spend some time in Central or South America. Or someone who is against socialized medicine to spend some time in any country that has it. Or anyone who can’t understand why African Americans don’t just do what the nice police officer who pulled them over for no reason says to do to spend some time in a third world country like the Philippines or Nigeria and learn what it truly means to have no power over a situation.

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May 21 2021
Current Affairs, Fog Of History, Propaganda, Religion, Shapiro, Stupid Republican Tricks, Terrorism

Fractured Fairy Tales

Fractured Fairy Tales Logo

 

I was a cartoon kid. I grew up on them, devoting endless Saturday mornings to the careful study of the various nuances of Underdog, Top Cat, or Yogi Bear. But far and away my absolute favorites were anything that came out of the Jay Ward factory. Bullwinkle and Rocky, Tom Slick, Dudley Do-Right, Peabody and Sherman. I may not have understood every joke, in fact there were times I knew something was a joke but too “adult” for me, but I loved the way they just kept spitting them out.

One that I generally did get the jokes for was Fractured Fairy Tales. Take a story that even at the age of seven or eight I had heard a zillion times and put a funny modern twist on it. Add that great narration by Edward Everett Horton and I’d say I would be on the floor laughing but I was already on the floor and laughing.

I bring this up because whenever there is fighting between Israel and an Arab entity (be it country or terrorist group) as there has been the last two weeks inevitably there will be a wag out there opining that this is just two peoples fighting over which Middle Eastern desert sect wrote down the better/correct fairy tales.

Both sides fairy tales are fractured. As are so many of the fairy tales we tell.

Personally I’m an atheist. Where did the world come from? Don’t know, don’t care. I deal with what is, not what might be. I wish the rest of the people in the world saw things as I see them, I think we’d all be better off, but I’m willing to respect a person’s right to their own opinion. You want to believe in God, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, the Church of Bob, that’s your belief system and if it works for you then as the kids these days say, you do you.

Where I do have a problem is when you want to take your personal belief system and impose it on everyone else. I’m not in favor of universal excommunication of all religion, but if your religion says in effect “Only our fairytale is the correct way to live your life, follow or we will make your life worthless” then I’m going to have to say “With all due respect, bullshit”.

Throughout human history we have told these fractured fairy tales. Ancient civilizations were mostly structured by fairy tales. What is a king or royalty but a construct by which a fable is told that this person, by right of family or maybe because he pulled a sword from a stone, is to rule over the rest of the land. As humans have evolved many societies have done away with that particular fairy tale or at least turned it into a profitable center of entertainment.

Yeah, I’m looking at you QEII.

The fairy tales did serve a somewhat useful purpose back in the day. They taught children to not steal from their neighbors or to be careful of the wolf in the forest or to not judge a beast too quickly for he may be an enchanted prince (or at least a nice guy). They also gave hope in a time when many lives were frankly hopeless. Maybe your fairy godmother will get you to the ball or a handsome prince will wake you from a spell or that even an ugly ducking can turn into a beautiful swan.

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Dec 15 2020
5 Comments
Athenae, Propaganda, So Called Liberal Media

Have We Considered Banning Bullshit?

This kind of “differing corporate culture” nonsense always makes my eyeballs itch: 

Rick Santelli, the veteran CNBC correspondent, recently got into an on-air spat with one of his longtime colleagues. Whether he will be given leeway to spar in similar fashion with new co-workers elsewhere in the company is something executives at NBCUniversal ought to work quickly to decide.

During an early-December panel on the business-news network’s “Squawk Box,” Santelli began to yell at Andrew Ross Sorkin, who pressed him on comments he had made about coronavirus restrictions at restaurants. Sorkin pushed his colleague to exercise greater caution about suggesting viewers should be able to crowd into restaurants the way they do into retail outlets.

“Who is this? Who is this?” asked Santelli, even though Sorkin has been a co-host of the program for almost a decade. As Sorkin prodded Santelli to reconsider what he said, the correspondent went into an on-air huff. “I disagree. I disagree! I disagree!” said Santelli, his voice rising with the issuance of each short sentence. “You can have your thoughts and I can have mine. I disagree.”

The piece goes on to describe the “culture clash” between people who are loud but mostly harmless and occasionally say a true thing, and people like Santelli and Bartiromo who are saying things that are not true and are actively hurting people. It is not a “culture clash” when one part of a news division says hey, maybe it will hurt our credibility to have science-deniers on TV all day every day jerking Trump off. That’s not, like, a problem with the decorations at the office party.

What if, instead of having a policy encoded in the HR manual, you just … didn’t hire dishonest political actors and/or, when the mostly normal people you hired turned Tea Party-feral on live television, you disciplined or fired them?

CRAZY TALK. I’m aware. Okay, let’s not make it about people and their sincerely held beliefs that COVID cannot travel inside a restaurant. How about just having a policy of individuals, whatever their private Facebook posts may say, not spouting dishonest shit on the air? Could we get behind that? How about our news policy should be that if you are demonstrably full of crap, if you are saying things that are not true, that can be debunked by a half-competent barn cat on shrooms, we don’t, you know, do that no more?

I KNOW, okay, there would be nothing to broadcast, this is why 24-hour cable news channels should be nuked from orbit or at least banned from the waiting rooms of dentist’s offices and airports. But this is the kind of that that, once it’s implemented at this high a level, filters down to your local fishwrap and becomes a cudgel to beat on anyone who speaks up about anything, regardless of substance.

Because that’s the thing. These aren’t regulated militias of relatively equal strength meeting for choreographed skirmishes on neutral ground. What someone is saying matters just as much as how loud and often they’re saying it. Are they being loud and obnoxious and combative in service, to, you know, the actual truth and the keeping of people alive? Or are they shouting things like BUY BEAR STEARNS when the company is about to go tits-up in a fashion that makes the Titanic look well-maintained?

Keeping that dude and his ten-a-penny imitators in the cocaine-piles to which they’ve become accustomed is not a problem with a “clash” of attitudes, it’s a problem with tolerating punditry being wrong all the time with zero consequences for said pundits, within the “corporate culture” or without.

Instead of making this about tactics and decibel levels and whether someone “glared” at the camera perhaps these fine news organizations should be examining if any of the information they’re giving to their audiences is remotely true or not. That would be a good place to start.

A.

ps. It is not okay for an entire network to be full of shit, broadcasting said shit 24 hours a day on the public airwaves, and for us all to shrug like “oh, that’s just Fox, you can’t expect a leper colony to not have any lepers.” It is not okay to just write off an entire propaganda network and let it exist so long as it doesn’t spread. Look around. It has spread some.

Aug 18 2020
1 Comment
Athenae, COVID-19, Propaganda, Stupid Republican Tricks

On Unity

I’ve been done since March 20th with shaming individual people for decisions that should have been handled by the institutions we task with such things. Mad at kids partying in a club?

That’s not on “college students,” who make terrible decisions, news at 11. It’s on the city, county and state, and the presumed adults who own and operate that club, to shut that shit down.

We keep acting like people aren’t people. The entire reason to have laws and regulations is because people are idiot assholes, and not just when they’re 19. I am a grown-ass woman who’s old enough to be embarrassing to her teenage nieces if she goes out dancing but I swear sometimes I feel like eff it, no one else is doing shit, why am I staying home?

You put out a tray of shots, I am taking one. SO STOP MAKING BUTTERY NIPPLES BY THE PITCHER, FER CHRISSAKES.

(This is a cousin to the news stories every year about stampedes for a waffle iron at Walmart on Black Friday. Everybody laughs at the poor people tripping over each other and nobody asks why the store encourages that shit.)

Periodically throughout this crisis we’ve heard about how we’re not united in our response to it, nor collectively experiencing it the way we have other major crises, and then told it’s all our fault: 

Still, focusing solely on Washington’s response to the pandemic would be letting the American public broadly off the hook, McElya said.

“We need to really consider this and talk about this as a collective national failure,” she said. “One certainly encouraged by our leadership. But people have to submit or commit to that narrative, and so many have, and that’s an enormous sadness.”

 

Look. I am not excusing people who’ve picked up on the anti-mask thing as one more way to be a belligerent dickhead to the sandwich girl, but someone sold them that line. A lot of someones, on a network that starts with F and ends with X and in the middle is an endless stream of grievances and resentments and fears. I don’t think you can let off the hook the people profiting from chaos and confusion.

Yelling at your neighbors on Facebook is where Republicans WANT you right now. They want you demoralized by the everyday stupidity of individuals instead of the rapacious greed of leadership. They want you to yell at me and me at you. Why? Because then we’re not yelling at them.

Christ, my neighborhood corona-info group had to BAN posts that were like I WAS OUT WALKING TODAY AND THERE WAS A PERSON NOT WEARING A MASK RIGHT because that’s all it was after a while, not the kinds of breakdowns of information that would actually inform anyone.

If we’re not focused as a nation on something, if we’re not facing something collectively, it’s not because young white people went to the bars and it’s not because somebody wasn’t wearing a mask in a public park. It’s because our president insisted we open the bars. It’s because the GOP’s propaganda network told people masks were tyranny.

Stop wishing for unity and then deploring your neighbors for the actions of your leaders. We don’t have time for this.

A.

Nov 27 2018
1 Comment
Athenae, Propaganda, So Called Liberal Media

Fox Gonna Fox

They were never a news organization: 

In one instance, according to emails revealed in a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the Sierra Club and reviewed by The Daily Beast, Pruitt’s team even approved part of the show’s script.

Fox & Friends has long been a friendly venue for Trump and his allies, but the emails demonstrate how the show has pushed standard cable-news practices to the extreme in order to make interviews a comfortable, non-confrontational experience for favored government officials.

And as long as we’re here, stop referring to Fox News as “state TV.” If they were “state TV” they’d have rolled over when Obama patted their bellies. They’re the GOP, through and through, always have been, and the only people this wasn’t obvious to on day one were their fellow journalists.

AKA the people who get paid to suss out bullshit and name it for what it is.

Those people demanded Fox receive entry into the hallowed press fraternity and derided as “liberally biased” anyone who said hey, this is a network full of crap at all times. They’re still covering for Fox, as is everyone who pretends Shep Smith is some kind of hero for occasionally talking sense while still cashing Murdoch’s slimy checks.

We were always heading toward the most dishonest of the warbloggers getting White House press credentials in a BRAWNDO administration once Fox stuck its nose in the henhouse.

A.

Oct 25 2018
1 Comment
Adrastos, Bigotry, Campaign Notes, Congress, Elections, Fog Of History, Fog Of Scandal, Political Crack, Propaganda, Terrorism, The Darnold, Twitter

The MAGA Bomber’s Enemies List

As of this writing, here’s who the MAGA Bomber is telling to pipe down by mailing them a pipe bomb:

  • George Soros
  • The Clintons
  • The Obamas
  • Eric Holder
  • John Brennan 
  • Debbie Wasserman Schultz
  • Maxine Waters
  • Joe Biden
  • Robert DeNiro

Robert Fucking DeNiro? It’s a good thing that he’s not in his prime or he just might go Raging Bull or even Taxi Driver on someone’s ass.  I guess that makes him the Paul Newman of this dangerously crazy incident: the salad dressing mogul was on Nixon’s enemies list. Bobby D is in good company.

Trump made a statement yesterday at the White House. Here’s how some wise ass described it on the tweeter tube:

He was back in full tilt Insult Comedian mode at a rally in Wisconsin last night and tweeted this out this morning:

He seems to think his tiny hands are clean. They are not. I know incitement speech when I hear it. The MAGA Bomber has been paying attention to Trump’s stump rantings: the members of the enemies list have all been attacked by the president*. In a word, disgusting.

There’s evidence that the MAGA Bomber comes from the creepy world of Pepe the Frog:

The pipe bomb discovered Wednesday and addressed to former CIA director John Brennan via CNN features a parody of the ISIS flag with the words “get ‘er done,” a common right-wing meme, according to a Wednesday NBC report.

On the fake flag, the Arabic words are replaced by suggestive female silhouettes. The meme reportedly originated on a far-right parody site called World News Bureau.
So much for false flaggery. Pipe bomb trutherism is a pipe dream but Rush Limbaugh is still pushing it as were these MAGA Maggots yesterday in Florida:

We’ve had periods of political violence before in our history but the incitement never came from the White House. That’s what makes this moment in time so fraught with peril. Here’s how Charlie Pierce put it yesterday:
In the 1970s, there were no national politicians encouraging the Weathermen to involve themselves in the political process. Bernadine Dohrn didn’t get to visit the White House. Of course, in the 1950s and the 1960s, there were southern state politicians a’plenty who knew the people who were setting off the bombs, but the national government was pretty much on the other side; even though it was often dilatory in that regard, it got there eventually. (In 2002 and 2003, the last two culprits in the Birmingham church bombing were finally convicted by Doug Jones, now a senator from Alabama.)
The current president* of the United States trafficks in imaginary threats and encourages, by word and deed, feelings of dread and isolation and deep, familiar paranoia, the entire Hofstadter buffet. And there is an entire media infrastructure dedicated to reinforcing those feelings, 24-7, on all platforms of the modern communications industry. The Weathermen didn’t have their own TV network.
There’s only one palliative for the pernicious and mendacious fearmongering by the Party of Trump; VOTE on November 6th, and in every election thereafter. Democratic control of at least one House of Congress means oversight and investigations. A Republican victory means an emboldened president*, a cowed Congress, an expanded enemies list, and more right-wing domestic terrorism.
Oct 23 2018
7 Comments
Athenae, Language, Propaganda

Civility Rights

Be polite while we kill you.

Be polite while we erase you.

Be polite while we cage you.

Be polite while we shoot you.

Be polite while we fire you.

Be polite while you’re less than.

Be polite while you’re ground under.

Be polite while you let us walk all over you. Kiss the foot that kicks you. Thank us for our scorn. Be polite. Be polite. Be polite.

Above all, be polite.

Don’t talk about politics. Don’t talk about war. Don’t talk about race. Don’t talk about the inherent inhumanity of ripping children from their mothers’ arms, about drone-bombing villages whose names you don’t even know, about paying someone $8 an hour to scrub toilets and calling it a good job. Don’t talk about local races, national races, international relations, sexual harassment, rape culture, gun control, climate change, factory farms. Don’t talk about where your kids go to school and how they get there and how it gets harder every day to raise them as people with compassion and grace when the voices that are raised up to the halls of power are calling down every day in hatred. Don’t talk about any of that.

Shh. Shut up. Everyone’s looking. Be polite.

Polite protects power. Polite and nice are unquestionably good and good is just as we are meant to be and good needs no defense. There’s no defense for their monstrosity. There’s no defense for the lies they tell and there’s no defense for the truth, either. Someone sent out a memo yesterday, the day before: several thousand poor and starving people are going to walk into your country and take what’s yours so you’d better vote for Republicans, because we’ll build a wall to keep them out.

Several million poor people are living in your country and they’re taking what’s yours so we’ll cut your taxes to stop them.

Just over a million people are living their lives out loud for the first time and it freaks you right out so we’ll write a law to wipe them out of existence.

Oh, you don’t like that? You object? You protest?

We’ll laugh at you, we’ll threaten you, we’ll fight you, we’ll kill you.

You fight back? You speak out? You stand up? How dare you.

Can’t have that. We’ll tell you to be polite. Everyone agrees it’s too loud and mean in here these days. Everyone agrees it’s colder than it used to be out there. Everyone agrees our country is divided. Became divided. The political divide, it deepens every day, because of this incivility.

Power is always civil. Power deserves courtesy, deference, respect. It wears a suit when it puts your daughter in a cage. It wears a uniform when it shoots your son. It’s never messy when it closes down your library; after all, it’s not like power burned those books, right? It has a prepared statement to e-mail to the press, blow-dried shiny hair, a podium to stand behind. It sincerely regrets. It wishes this could have gone another way. It tells you this can’t be helped. It’s so clean.

You’re the messy one. Yelling. Hair all wild, eyes wide, top of your lungs. Who do you think you are? What do you think you’re doing? Who is all of this shouting supposed to convince, anyway? Who is the audience for it? What is the BRAND?

If you really want to make a difference, you should sit on a stage next to the monster, calmly debate him for an audience of journalists and lobbyists and hobbyists at being human. Their opinions REALLY matter. They’re thought leaders leading thoughts. They get their op-eds published, in the name of “free speech.” Your speech should be just as free. You should sit next to the monster in the exact same chair as him, so we can judge his suit against your hoodie with the rude slogan, and find you wanting, if in no other way than appearance.

Don’t like it? Don’t think it’s fair? That’s the way the world works, kiddo. Sarah Huckabee Sanders had a right to that cheese plate. You risk turning everyone against you by standing on the public street.

With your rude T-shirt declaring your rights, human rights.

With your sign.

That says, please don’t kill me.

A.

Sep 18 2018
Athenae, Propaganda, So Called Liberal Media

Wingnut Sites That Are Wrong About Everything Are Wrong Again, Surprise Duh

If you come forward to accuse a powerful man, a content farm might aggregate your RateMyProfessor.com reviews, which are themselves a collection of anonymous bullshit from who-knows-where, and use them to savage you in a story that turns out to be ABOUT THE WRONG CHRISTINE FORD: 

Brett Kavanaugh’s formerly anonymous accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, has come forward. She’s a professor in the Social Work Department at California State University – Fullerton. Many interested in learning more about who Ford is have come across her students’ reviews on RateMyProfessors.com. 

They’re … not good.

Overall, she scores 2.3 out of 5 (a failing grade if the roles were reversed). The reviews span from 2010 – 2014, which rules out students tampering with her reviews as part of the current Kavanaugh controversy. 

[snip]

Editor’s Note: We apologize for the error, but we’ve since learned there are two Christine Fords working in clinical psychology in California and we wrote this report about the wrong Christine Ford. We regret not going to greater lengths to ensure this was indeed the same Christine Ford. Please do not share this article with anyone (and if you have, delete it/withdraw it); we are only leaving the page up so you can see this important update.

So this gets posted, picked up by a bunch of wingnut sites, and goes everywhere before the idiots realize that they’ve got the wrong person. And over something so dumb as RateMyProfessor reviews, which are about as reliable as Yelp reviews of a concert where somebody died on stage.

This isn’t even a smear job from someone in authority (though plenty of people treated as legit journalists cough*DRUDGE*cough picked this up), just a bad, dumb, clickwhoring stab from somebody who thought hey, I’ll get a piece of this roiling clusterfuck for my very own!

This is why women don’t come forward to accuse the powerful: There’s an army of bootlicks out there, ready to tear the accusers down. Not for power or money but because it’s fun to cackle and make a mess. They’re chaos-causing shitlords who don’t give a damn about the damage they create, and once unleashed will deny all responsibility for the trash fire they lit.

And this is why I keep beating the drum that national media who let these types of people into their parties and treat them like respected colleagues (“Matt Drudge Rules Our World“) have contributed to the very atmosphere they now deplore, where things like this happen and are corrected after the fact, like the strikethrough makes it better, like it’s just an honest mistake.

Via Doc.

A.

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