lmao

Excellent

Advent Calendar is A+++

In non-Trump news:

As chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) used $150,000 in taxpayer dollars to settle with a former aide who alleged he was fired in part because he was not willing to focus his investigative work on Hillary Clinton.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/power...a3e_story.html

found actual footage i think

Since The Intercept usually only gets **** on here or maligned as "Greenwald's site", here are a couple good articles I happened to notice just now:

Twitter's explanation for why they allowed Trump's anti-Muslim speech in clear violation of their hate policy is totally incoherent

GOP touts list of 137 economists who support their tax bill that features people who are definitely not economists

Trump spoiled my vote. He didn't tell who he's gonna fire though.

Second one is very good. How much more farcical can this get? How many times in the last couple years have I thought that?

Related to our interactions from a few days ago, remember that "here's a list of Fauxconismists who love our tax cuts like this dead economist who passed away in 1987 and some right wing blogger who works for H&R Block" is performative, it's pretense, and it's FOR YOU. The right-wingers embrace a two-pronged policy of business friendly regulatory / tax climate and opportunistic racism. THAT'S IT. And it has no philosophic or empirical underpinning besides "we want money and hate black people." THAT'S IT.

All other observations you can make about the entire movement are Kabuki theater, for you, the normal person, to obscure that fact. These are not sincere people. This is not meant to be taken seriously by sharp analysts. We are constantly surprised by how farcical this gets because deep down, we fall for this. Deep down, in our lizard brains, we believe we are bargaining with well-meaning and honest counterparts. The right games this endlessly.

It's of course funny and obviously I too am surprised by how brazen it is. But only because I slip back into a naive pose. Once you realize the entire apparatus cares only about hoarding money and dehumanizing Others, that things like empirical analysis and logical coherence and morals and ethics are liberal values, not theirs, then you have your explanation. There's no bottom because the entire right-wing effort to engage with the outside world is shameless in conceit, from the start.

Yeah. I guess the surprise is that this now appears to be true of the GOP establishment. I don't think it's true of the entire Right - guys like Mitt Romney, the Bushes, neocons like Kristol, etc; I think they do care about logical coherence and the rest. But it's clearly always been true of a huge chunk of the base and Trumpism is the expression of that and Trumpism now owns the GOP. The guys who care about anything but tax cuts, nationalism and hating browns are the exception.

Some deplorable (manbearpuig I think) posted "BUT WHATABOUT NANCY PELOSI SAYING WE NEED TO PASS THE ACA BILL TO SEE WHATS IN IT" in the SE Politics thread after the GOP crammed the tax bill through in about 10 minutes flat. That's a situation where "Does he really believe that ****? Does he know it's made up?" are the wrong questions. He quite obviously doesn't care; it's theater.

I think the true dedicated bull****ter is to be distinguished from cynical creeps like Ted Cruz who use political theater to self-aggrandize. I mean when Cruz used the GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN circus to his advantage, it was pretty obviously calculated, like "I will use this nonsense to self promote". It wasn't the Trump style blitzkrieg against the whole idea of truth. You could see late in the campaign, when Cruz ran into the depths of Trump's disregard for truth, that it kind of blew his mind.

Speaking of Cruz, where the hell is he? I assume he's making himself scarce until all this **** blows over.

No glory possible in picking Tillerson.

KUSHNER

dream big

So many grabbing at the low lying fruit.

Kushner out. Furthermore, Tilly still on the island in the swamp Jan 1, 2018.

Continuing on the Boomers WOAT conversation (from that tweet in the other thread about how they reaped the rewards of a robust welfare state for decades before dismantling it for everyone else): this image from this article (about a housing fight in Berkeley over a developer who wants to build 3 townhomes on a lot, to the objection of everyone else in the neighborhood) shows how new home building started cratering in the Bay Area around the 80s, leading to the current housing crisis



They got theirs and told everyone else to stay out

Bay Area First!

Only remotely related: I just finished Carl Sagan's novel, Contact. It's way more sciencey than the movie. Sagan wasn't a great futurist, though. Writing in the early 80s about future events in the late 90s, he didn't predict the internet, cell phones, or the collapse of the Soviet Union. I thought he had invented the Earth Firster group that was a prime suspect in the destruction of the Machine, but it turns out Earth First! is an actual radical environmental group that started in the late 70s. (I wasn't aware until last year of the history of America First, and never heard of Britain First until Trump's tweet this week.) Oh well, still a good story, with a nice twist at the end that isn't in the movie.

As far as I'm concerned, Sagan gets a pass on needing to be accurate with any other predictions. (From "The Demon Haunted World", 1995)

I've only seen the movie. What was the twist in the book?

I thought Sagan's comments on society, religion and politics in Contact were pretty astute, though as things have turned out, somewhat on the optimistic side.

It involves a minor character that isn't in the movie.

Asimov was the GOAT sci-fi writer. He wrote all the sci-fi things, long before anybody else. Name your trope, he was there first.

Some third world countries have had success combating medical superstitions by teaching children how to spot obviously fake nonsense.

The US is sorely in need of educating children on how to spot flim flam. Granted, we all know the GOP would fiercely oppose teaching children how to spot their obvious bs.

Jules Verne tho