- For International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Batocchio at Vagabond Scholar applies lessons about the responsibility of silent bystanders to this season’s dangerous events.
- Last Of The Millenniums reminds us how some things and people are out of place.
- (O)CT(O)PUS at The Swash Zone takes us back to Hillary scandals which now seem petty, overblown, or not scandals at all.
- Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez considers the almost certainty that the cell phone President Trump insists on continuing to use has been hacked. He calls for a national security damage assessment.
- Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger takes a quick graphic look at what Republicans have just done to prevent another Benghazi, and finds something odd.
- At The Onion, Donald Trump explains how waterboarding doesn’t compare with the torment he is forced to experience.
- Dave Dubya reviews the new administration’s quick attacks on a free press, the right to peaceably assemble, and the dissemination of facts.
- Frances Langum notices that, while Republicans like the wall, GOP leadership wants American taxpayers to pay for it after all. Something to do with profit margins.
- Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass reminds us that enrollment in Affordable Healthcare ends Tuesday, and that Trump has cancelled paid-for advertising to notify those without coverage.
- Vincent at A Wayfarer’s Notes likes that Donald Trump is unvarnished and thinks our new President is unfairly hated.
- Conservative T. Paine, at Saving Common Sense, gets some unfair flack on facebook, and generalizes about folks with which he disagrees. Being a fairminded person, he does allow dissenting comments, including my own. Plus, I happen to know he’s a good guy.
- Max’s Dad breaks his leg, gets laid up, and takes time to count the ways the nation is going askew.
- Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post is bouncing back from some dramatic health issues. Welcome back, Jack.
Month: January 2017
Listen to the Voices 1/28/2017
Donald Trump’s Delicate Personal Quest
He needs to exaggerate his intelligence.
He needs to exaggerate his popularity.
He especially has a reflexive, exaggerated need to defend his growling tough masculinity.
More – –
If You Don’t Believe Anymore, Who Called You Into Ministry?
From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:
In this post, I want to focus on the question, “If you don’t believe in Jesus anymore, who do you think called you into the ministry?”
This is a fairly common question I am asked when someone is trying to square my current atheistic life with that of the twenty-five years I spent in the ministry. I believed that it was GOD who called me into the ministry, but now I believe that this same God is a fiction. If God doesn’t exist, who is it then that spoke to my “heart” as a fifteen-year-old boy, telling me that I was to be a pastor, a preacher of the good news of the gospel?
Voter Fraud, Lies, and Hypocrisy
From Iron Knee at Political Irony:
Donald Trump seems obsessed with the fact that he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton. In particular he keeps claiming (including to Congressional leaders on Monday) that he would have won the popular vote but for millions of illegal votes cast by undocumented aliens, even though multiple investigations have found no evidence of voter fraud.
Wednesday, Trump doubled down…
Random Observations
From Infidel753:
If you aren’t sure which side is right in some social or political controversy, look for which side most of the guys in suits and ties are supporting. That’s the side which is wrong. This rule works in probably 95% of cases.
o o o o o
Military conscription is a device whereby old, decrepit males slake their resentment and envy of young, vigorous males by enslaving them and exposing them to dismemberment, disfigurement, and death.
o o o o o
The enemy is not the person who says “I want to do that”. The enemy is the person who says “You can’t do that”.
Hater for Hating Hate
From Capt. Fogg Human Voices:
Yes, sure, call me a hater for hating hate, for hating corruption, for hating the murder of things I hold fundamental, self-evident: for hating the summary destruction of the infrastructure of our former Republic and you’re right, I hate Donald Trump and I hate the people who support his outrages and I hate them to the point where the word itself is strained to the point of breaking. It may be your right to withdraw, to close your eyes and wait for the end times and whatever they may bring. Just understand that to me it’s the patriot’s duty, the citizen’s burden and the obligation of the honest man to oppose and to be seen to be opposing the rise of tyrannical corruption and the acts of treason we will have to endure if you do.
The State of American Journalism in Two Tweets
From driftglass:
Make a little Post-It note and put it up where you can see it every day to remind you to begin your thinking about resistance each day with two, cold facts: First, from the Bastard President all the way down to your Crazy Uncle Liberty, the Republican Party is a rabid dog, and second, the Fourth Estate sold us out and abandoned their post years ago.
Donald Trump’s Delicate Personal Quest
Sometimes the little things are telling: the unconscious mannerisms, the conscious affectations.
Donald Trump’s hands were always interesting. From the beginning, the gestures reminded me of something. It took a while to figure it out. A old girlfriend from decades ago used some of the same gestures. The delicate meeting of finger and thumb in overly precise little circles, the movement of the hands themselves making larger circles with those tiny delicate signs, the overall little mincing motions.
His language itself seems an oddity, with overly repetitive adjectives. Tough guys are never just tough, or even very tough. They’re very, very tough, occasionally very, very, very tough. Jennifer Jones, a linguistic expert at the University of California did a study of how language is used.
Her research dealt with linguistic patterns, comparing men with women, then Presidents and candidates with each other. Donald turns out to be off the chart on the feminine side.
Today, that seems to be a harmless curiosity. But that would not have always been the case. Like our President, I was born during the Truman administration. Back when I was a kid, one boy telling another boy he talked like a girl would have been grounds for a street fight.
Children can be cruel. Parents are sometimes brutal. Donald’s father was a bare knuckle participant in Ku Klux Klan demonstrations, arrested at one point for brawling with police during a Klan outburst in New York City. What harsh reaction would such a father have had to the slightest hint of femininity?
Donald Trump, in his public presentation of himself, seems to put a premium on demonstrations of manliness. The rhetoric is obvious. Exhorting this audiences to rough up protestors, joining with supporters in his longing for the good old days, days when the hospital was the destination of dissent.
In Patchogue, NY, he became a bit more explicit. In sight of the parking lot where an immigrant walking home from work had been famously knifed to death by a pack of neighborhood toughs, he mocked the neighborhood for not being tough enough.
I can’t believe. I know some of the guys in this room. they’re so tough. Some of the tough guys I know.
On this occasion he did not simply offer the usual promises of restoring jobs, of getting rid of immigrants and refugees who were taking those jobs. He scolded community toughs for not handling it themselves.
I can’t believe you guys would allow that to happen. What the hell, are you getting soft?
They’re getting soft on me, I don’t believe this. Right?
They know what I’m talking about.
– Donald Trump, April 14, 2016
The rhetorical style went beyond the tough-guy words themselves. Donald Trump includes in almost every speech a signature growl, kind of like back when Alfred Hitchcock included a brief glimpse of himself in every movie he made. The Trump growl is somewhat high pitched, but it is unmistakable. I may be alone in thinking it sounds like Linda Ronstadt at her best. “You’re no good, you’re no good, Baby you’re no good.”
The timing of the growl is a bit of an oddity. He includes it at strange moments, when growling seems to add nothing to whatever point he is making.
In Patchogue, the night he urged tough guys to get tougher, he read a poem of sorts. It compared refugees to poisonous snakes. He growled in his squeaky sort of way about 10 times, by my count. At one point, he growled while narrating a “tender woman” trying to help the deadly snake.
But if I hadn’t brought you in by now, heavens, you might have died.
Listening to Donald’s little poem, I wondered how he thought the narrative was advanced by making that fictional naive woman growl at the snake.
It later came to me that the growl was for another purpose. He randomly feels the need to show off his manliness to his audience. That night he thought he saw a lot of tough guys his audience. After all, this was the neighborhood known for attacking and killing an immigrant. So he growled at them, often.
Pretty much everyone is familiar with the infamous tape of Donald Trump boasting about his sexual exploits.
I’m going to use some tic-tacs, just in case I start kissing her. I’m automatically attracted to beautiful women — I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet. I don’t even wait.
It was jarring on a number of levels. If his claims on tape had been true, he would have been confessing to criminal sexual assault.
The future President later released a statement dismissing the tape and his own sexual boasts. “This was locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago.”
I don’t find it difficult to believe that he truthfully considered that sort of talk to be locker room banter. Half a century of so ago, in high school, I remember a few boys awkwardly boasting to other kids about how many girls they had enticed into sex. No “locker room banter” in those days would have included bragging about forcing a young woman to do much of anything. A rape attempt would not have implied sexual prowess.
And nobody back then boasted about kissing. Kissing? Seriously?
A kid would have been laughed into the hallway. Just start kissing them? Like a puppy dog licking a victim’s face? The belittling cultural image of little boys kissing little girls, uninvited, goes back centuries. It is reflected in children’s nursery rhymes:
Georgie Porgie, Pudding and pie,
Kissed the girls and made them cry,
When the boys came out to play,
Georgie Porgie ran away.
Part of the story Donald has woven about himself includes a propensity for schoolyard fighting.
Those childhood school fights are as important to President Trump as his unproven Wooten grades. “I’m a smart person, believe me.” Could those fights have been at the insistence of a battering parent? How about an extreme, conservative father with a tendency toward street fighting? How about an extreme, conservative father back in a much harsher decade?
Those fights supposedly resulted in his desperate father sending him off to military school in a last ditch effort to instill sadly lacking discipline. Is that really easier to believe than a vicious upbringing, a violent, intolerant father becoming enraged at the barest hint of ladylike behavior?
Military school may indeed have been a last opportunity to straighten out a tough kid. It just doesn’t seem to fit a parent proud of beating up on police while marching for the Klan. After all, some kids were sent to such schools to toughen them, to man them up.
Donald Trump would not be the only leader in history to feel the need to demonstrate manhood.
Authoritarian regimes often put a premium on masculinity, especially in military displays. Parades include the goosestepping, straight legged, individual drill, supposedly a demonstration of strength and manliness.
For a long time, Western Europe was part of that tradition. They stopped it as World War I ate up the countryside. Goosestepping wore out the troops and troops were needed for training and fighting. Now we associate those martial displays with old Nazi propaganda films and modern parades put on by dictatorships.
The late unlamented Soviet state frequently put on goosestepping parades along with rows and rows of military weaponry: tanks and missile launchers and such. We’re tough, we’re strong. Just look at our guns and goosesteps. Manly all the way.
Putin in Russia and Kim Jong-un in North Korea still feel the need to give the populace a show of manly force.
Donald Trump had wanted, had insisted on, a Soviet style military display during his inaugural parade. Tanks and missile launchers were to be taken through the streets of Washington as troops marched in a grand display of martial force.
Events on Inauguration Day didn’t go exactly as President Trump had wished. It wasn’t just the crowd size or the dishonest media who honestly reported it. It wasn’t just the negative reaction of the press, punditry, and general public to the inaugural address.
An inside source reported that the plan for a grand show of military might was shot down by the military. Seems the roads wouldn’t support the weight of trucks, tanks, and missile launchers. Apparently, making highways around the White House unusable for auto traffic after the parade was over was considered sub-optimal.
A shame. It would have been beautiful, a manly display of boastful strength.
And it would fit.
It would bring into alignment the tough talk to tough guys, the Linda Ronstadt high pitched growl, the delicate hand gestures, the relentless grasping toward masculine imagery, the awkward Georgie Porgie sexual boasts to strangers (I just have to be kissing them. I don’t even wait.)
The real source of his continuing quest for manliness is subject to guess. It may have nothing to do with the harsh reaction of a brutal father to any hint of feminine gestures, or a high pitched voice, or an effeminate choice of words.
Whatever the reason, the next four years will be an experience. The administration of national law enforcement, the control of an unparalleled military, the mincing finger on the nuclear button, will be constant reminders.
A minority of our country have given enormous power to an insecure individual anxiously grasping at every opportunity to prove his manhood.
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Alternative Facts and Real Propaganda
From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:
On Sunday, Kellyanne Conway tried to cover up for Sean Spicer’s peculiarly lying and hostile beration of the assembled media for reporting a verifiable thing–that the crowd for Donald Trump’s inauguration was a bit thin–by asserting that he was providing “alternative facts.”
“Alternative facts”, Chuck Todd was forced to explain, would be “falsehoods”. Because facts are things that are true. The alternative to them is things that are not. He did not use the more accusatory term “lie”, although if Trump spin keeps trying to soulcycle their way through reality, they might discover that indoor and outdoor spinning ain’t the same animal and that no matter how tough an artificial regime is, it isn’t the dirt bike trail of actual politics–lying might still be, new political climate or not, an “eat-dirt” wipe-out event where policy rubber meets the human road. (Damn. That extended metaphor. Fuck it. I’m keeping it. Tom Friedman eat your heart out.)
So give it another day, and WH Press Secretary Sean Spicer is back out here “disagreeing with facts”.
Yep. Still on about crowd size for some bizarre reason.
Face Recognition of Cattle: Can it be Done?
From The Journal of Improbable Research:
“Contrary to popular belief that all cattle look alike, this paper presents a current state of the art research and study in animal biometric based recognition a system which provides an important insight in the identification of cattle based on their facial images.”