Category Archives: Nonsense

06.10.16
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Last Trump Post of the Week!

Everywhere today has been stories about the incredible garbage fire/dumpster fire/train wreck-plane crash combo that is the Trump campaign. There’s really little need to rehash it: thinking he can put California in play (or at least pretending to); trying to compete in New York (!) with his top NY aide Carl Paladino (!!); not raising money, not building a staff, having no national or regional ground game, thinking that his twitter feed is enough of a rapid response team (that’s literally true), etc. The polls are beginning to separate, even before the Obama/Warren/clinching the nomination bump (and well before Bernie’s voters step back and realize the real stakes).

There’ll be some ups and downs, and some Clinton scandals and “scandals”, more of the latter, but this will be a dominant theme. And it’ll hurt. After all, the predicate of his entire fucking campaign is that he’s the world’s best manager, and everyone says he is the best leader, and it’s called leadership, ok, and a lot of people say that Mr. Trump, you’re the best leader in business, ok?  That he can’t be bothered to hire a single competent person outside of Paul Manafort- that he thinks Carl Paladino is his New York whisperer- shows that, again, to be as big a lie as anything in his lifetime full of them.

But just for fun, let’s have one more quote about why he doesn’t need to raise money, certainly not the $1 billion he pledged to raise a month ago (sensing a pattern?):

 Naturally, he’s backtracked on that figure, telling Bloomberg, “I just don’t think I need nearly as much money as other people need because I get so much publicity. I get so many invitations to be on television. I get so many interviews, if I want them.

What an unbelievable chump. Never mind that his calculations are ridiculous. He’s such an insecure and arrogant dipshit that he’s bragging about being able to get interviews when he is the nominee for President of the United States. You know who else can get all the interviews they want? Hillary Clinton. And every single major party candidate for President in the history of any medium. This is not a strategic edge. What a ludicrous chump.

06.10.16
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Euro 2016, Trump’s Con, and More Quick Hits

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Suas an Irish!

  • The Guardian has a fun little article today on Euro 2016, helping Americans choose what team they should root for by finding the closest analogy to a local squad. Ireland was compared to the Buffalo Bills which is…not ideal. Northern Ireland got the Raptors, which is too boring to even be tragic. The analogy for the Cubs was Poland, and I am sure there is a joke there somewhere, but we daren’t touch it. The best description was for Spain, who is your team if you like the Red Sox. “Years without success for one of the sport’s big teams? Check! A resurgence with titles galore at the start of the 21st century? Double check! A nagging feeling that their very best years may be behind them? Check! Check and triple check!” Left out: you’re probably an asshole. 
  • Speaking of the Cubs, as a White Sox fan, let me assure you that, the post at the beginning of the year notwithstanding, we’re never going to speak of baseball again. Bitterly shouting “Big Game James!” every 5th day might be the only joy left in my life.
  • Programming note for next week: we’re going to have a lot of posts on the Waukesha Diversion, which will have a final decision by the end of the month (and it looks like a go). This is a complicated issue, which is key for how we’ll use water in the coming dry years, and really hinges on the role the geography and geology play in our lives. Hope you like Great Lakes stuff!
  • Jim Newell has a smart piece on how Donald Trump might actually bankrupt the GOP by running in places like New Jersey and California. Key line: “There is something about Trump’s personality that makes him believe he needs a marquee media-centric state like California. He probably doesn’t see the typical Republican strategy of cleaning up in the South and the Plains as “flashy” enough for his brand.” This is, I think, correct, and wish Newell had gone a little further with it. The entire idea of Donald Trump, as businessman, is using flash to cover up enormous deficits and kicking the can down the road. Most of us call it lying, but Trump has always known there are a lot of people dumb enough to believe something, and then fail to check on it later (remember his claims that his birth certificate investigators couldn’t believe what they’ve been finding? That’s no different than saying “Everyone says this casino is going to be a huge success!) That’s been the key to his campaign as well. Promises, based on his name and “success”, that everything is going to be good, just believe me. It’s why he keeps saying that he’ll be so Presidential you’ll vomit in terror, ok?   The sell, the con, is to say something is going to be great to hypnotize the gulls and hope they give you money, and then never follow through. The point isn’t to change, but to convince people that you will, and then keep doing it, over and over. He relies on the sunk cost fallacy. People have invested so much that they hope, this time, he means it, and that it’ll pay off. That has worked for him, weirdly, in business. He always flees before the bills come due, usually literally.  I’m not particularly optimistic, but I think that there’s a chance a lifetime of fraudulence could blow up in his face, and the entire image could come shattering down. At the very least, isn’t it pretty to think so?
06.08.16
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The Times Finds The Worst

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This is the movie where this blog’s name sort of came from! Isn’t that neat? Image from giphy.com

There might not be a lower form of political allegiance than basing your positions against a candidate’s worst supporters. Every candidate has some dumbass people voting for them; it is statistically inevitable. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t disquieting when fellow supporters say really dumb things to the NYTimes. I’m going to caveat that they are young(ish), and the heat of a primary battle makes monsters of us, all, but come on…

(Names withheld- they are in the Times, but it is not my job to call them out further)

(blank) a 26-year-old filmmaker from Glendale, Calif., was not interested in milestones. He said he thought Mrs. Clinton was a crook. “She could be indicted literally tomorrow if the system is not corrupt,” he said…

(blank) an actress living in Los Angeles, assailed Mrs. Clinton for having proclaimed victory before the Democratic Party had formally bestowed it on her at the convention.

“I think it’s absolutely unjust, undemocratic, un-American,” she said. “What kind of example is that setting?”

The first one could easily come from a Trump rally, and I am pretty sure if pushed, the speaker would give no more a coherent answer to the question of “for what” than did Trump (“for the servers!”). The second makes one think she started paying attention to politics approximately yesterday.

And all that’s fine. It is what happens when an exciting candidate comes to the forefront. New people get involved, and that’s great. And again, passions run high. But some of this has to come from the top. Sanders didn’t come close to congratulating Clinton yesterday. He doesn’t have to concede, though he should accede to reality. This isn’t a matter of playing the room. The crowd wouldn’t have booed him if he started to say nice things about Clinton.

I still think he will. I think he’ll take a few days, talk to Obama, and then begin to come around. As many have pointed out, this is the 8-year anniversary of when Hillary conceded eight long years ago, and she became a dynamite surrogate. I don’t expect the same level of commitment from Sanders, who has no real party loyalty, but I think he’s canny enough to know that it is time to roll it up.Maybe one last big, tearful, joyful speech in DC next week. Maybe the Times will find people who are more elegiac next time.

06.03.16
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Quote of the Day

Presented without comment…

In an interview with The New York Times during Mrs. Clinton’s speech, Mr. Trump said that Mrs. Clinton’s performance was “terrible” and “pathetic.” He added: “I’m not thin-skinned at all. I’m the opposite of thin-skinned.”

05.25.16
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2016

 

Please? Image from Melencholia

 

So, it turns out that billionaire libertarian Trump-supporting James O’Keefe-loving prick Peter Thiel was bankrolling the Hulk Hogan-Gawker trial, in which Hogan was taped during what he thought was a private conversation saying terrible racist things (while having sex with his best friend’s wife). Thiel is using his money to destroy a media company that he doesn’t like, because the media company, who thinks that anything involving a famous person is news, outed him in 2007.

Hogan’s “best friend”, by the way, is “Tampa-area radio shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge Clem”, who you know is just the worst.

This is one of those cases where you have a sliver of sympathy for everyone (except Bubba the Love Sponge), but they are also all reprehensible, and you pretty much just wish the sun would explode.

05.24.16
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Trump and Hillary Poll Numbers: The Bernie Argument

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If Bernie won, you’d be seeing this guy on a lot more GOP ads.

One more political quick hit, and that’s it, I promise.

It’s true that, for the moment, Bernie matches up more favorably against Trump, and has a much higher personal approval rating than does Hillary. I don’t think that would ever change. He genuinely seems likable (though that might be changing a bit), and Hillary has always had problems, partly due to her, largely due to other factors (such as lies, innuendo, and an idiot press). I can’t imagine a scenario where Bernie is less liked than Hillary Clinton.

That said, these numbers, which Sanders supporters use to say he should be the nominee (as opposed to millions of actual voters), don’t take one thing into account: namely, the right wing media has, since Clinton became inevitable, praised Bernie at her expense, and stopped criticizing him. If Sanders was actually winning, and had a shot, you’d hear the word “socialism” 400 times a day. They’d be conflating it with Communism, and calling him “comrade”, and talking about how “it isn’t a coincidence that his rise comes on the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution, and is that what we really want?”, and I promise that you wouldn’t be able to drive through three consecutive counties in this great nation of ours without seeing his face and Stalin’s on the same billboard. If you can’t picture Trump going around saying “Listen, ok, no one knows history better than Trump, and communism was really bad, ok?” then you have a tragic lack of political imagination.

Socialism, thankfully, isn’t as much a poison word for people who grew up after the Cold War. But it still has an emotional sway with millions and millions of people, and if Sanders was the nominee, that’s all you’d be hearing. I don’t know if that would sink him, since he’d also get more airtime to explain himself, and why socialism is not un-American, but a genuine part, the best part, of our economic and cultural heritage. But it’s disingenuous to suggest that polling numbers would be the same if he was closer to the nomination, and the target of the same kind of smear campaign Hillary has been under for 30 years.

05.17.16
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Something to make every day better

Bad news on all fronts, so here’s something that can cheer you up.

Birds are dinosaurs (this isn’t breaking news; bear with me). It isn’t that dinosaurs “evolved into birds”; it’s that we saw the evolutionary result and called them birds before we knew what dinosaurs were. If you think that’s disappointing, then think about them ripping a fish from the sea or tearing apart a worm with their fearsome claws and beaks or swooping down at 60 mph to grab and devour a hapless vole or basically just fucking with Tippi Hedren. It’s pretty awesome. Randall Munro at xkcd explains it better, as usual.

Birds and Dinosaurs
So how does that make life better? Just start calling birds “dinosaurs”. As in, “Man, Gary, I got like zero sleep. These dinosaurs were making a ton of racket outside my window,” or “Our blueberry bush is doing great, but I can’t keep the squirrels or the dinosaurs away.” You’ll see that makes every day just a little better.

05.13.16
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Political Quick Hits: Trump’s Butler, Facebook’s Journalism, and Mark J. Perrone on Paul Ryan

 

“I’ll remove my hand when Mr. Trump lets me!”

 

  1. I guarantee you right now there are people bemoaning the fact that Trump’s racist, unhinged sycophant of a butler is getting a call from the Secret Service for wishing President and Mrs. Obama to be hung for treason and saying he’d happily do it himself. Watch this turn into a rant about the 1st Amendment and Obama’s thuggish storm troopers, sent by (why not?) Eric Holder, who’s probably up to something nefarious, somewhere. The Secret Service, of course, has to do a perfunctory investigation of every threat to the President. That’s kind of their job, and it’ll probably entail a quick conversation wherein the establish that he’s simply a racist coward who spent an entire lifetime sucking up to other racist cowards, and move on. That won’t stop the complaining of course, but they have to do it. I’m sure at one point Leon Czolgosz was like “Oh, can’t a fellow even talk anymore? Don’t I have the right to express myself? When did this turn into Soviet Germany?” (Leon was pretty prescient).
  2. That said, I can’t imagine there will be too much wagon-circling around the Senecal (though “The Butler Said It” will be about 10,000 headlines). If you’re like me, you tread warily and reluctantly into comment sections on places like Newsmax or Breitbart or FOX. That, only more unhinged, are the sections of his Facebook page. When anyone says that the only racism is toward whites or that there isn’t something wild and loose and unchained in this country, point them to these. These are seriously unstable people, and they aren’t alone. For proof they aren’t, look at, say, the Republican Primary. (Warning: screenshot below from Mother Jones will probably make you sick and wail and gnash your teeth at the very thought that we live in the same country as people like this).
  3.                                    
  4. So yeah, it turns out that Facebook’s Newsfeed isn’t entirely algorithmic, and that human editors have some say. According to The Guardian, “Facebook relies heavily on just 10 news sources to determine whether a trending news story has editorial authority. “You should mark a topic as ‘National Story’ importance if it is among the 1-3 top stories of the day,” reads the trending review guidelines for the US. “We measure this by checking if it is leading at least 5 of the following 10 news websites: BBC News, CNN, Fox News, The Guardian, NBC News, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Yahoo News or Yahoo.” This of course has caused panic on the right, despite the presence of The Journal and Fox, because of reports that the editors would ignore stories from Breitbart or Newsmax. John Thune is screwing on his most handsomely concerned face to call for an investigation. Let’s ignore that Facebook is a private company. This is an important issue; millions get their news exclusively from Facebook, so what they decide is trending actually does matter. What Facebook does has an impact on our democracy. Which is why this is the best story ever about Facebook. I mean, come on: have you ever felt so positive about Facebook before? They actually use real news sources with fact-checkers and a sense of responsibility. Pushing stories from Newsmax, a place that Trump’s butler would think is “a little leftist”, would be wildly irresponsible. This is good citizenship by Facebook. This paints them in a much better light.  It’s not like you see Daily Kos or Shooting Irrelevance there either (although the latter would be fine). It’s a sign of modern conservativism that they see unholy bias in a publishing company not promoting the poorly-transcribed fever dreams from right-wing tidal swamps.
  5. A few days ago I ranted a bit about the Friends of the Parks in Chicago blocking the Lucas Museum, calling them “petty-tyrant pecksniffs”. However, and I’m honestly not quite sure how I missed this, I read that they are being represented in court by Thomas Geoghegan, a man whom I think is among the most honorable in the whole city, and who I admire greatly. This is a pickle, and it means that I failed as a blogger: reacting without doing enough research. I still think it is absurd, but I imagine the argument being that simply because a billionaire wants Rahm to jump doesn’t mean everyone has to say “how high”, which I respect, even if I think that ultimately the musuem is a GREAT idea. But Geoghegan vs. Rahm, man, it’s not even a question of which side you pick. Geoghegan vs. Father Pfleger? That’s much tighter. Their being on opposites sides of an issue is making my moral compass all loopy.
  6. Finally, Paul Ryan, and his vacant-eyed Hamlet vacillation on Donald Trump’s rough-palmed courtship.  I actually don’t envy Ryan his position at all, but he does deserve it. For an interpretation of the last few days, I’ll turn it over to friend of blog Mark J. Perrone, Private Eye. The title is “Thou Are Not False, But Thou Art Fickle”

 

“Maybe I won’t even go to the dance!”

 

Man, Paul Ryan is the Princess and the Fucking Pea.
 
I was watching MSNBC at the gym this morning, and his big “meeting” with Trump is today.  They’re covering it like these schmucks are dividing up postwar Europe. 
 
Reporter: “Trump arrived earlier to the building via car, a bold move.” 
 
Different Reporter: “We believe that Trump and Ryan are currently exchanging human words.” 
 
GOP Tool: “We think Paul Ryan will ultimately come to accept Trump as the nominee.  He just simply doesn’t know Trump, since his every utterance has only been covered ad nauseum for a year.”  
 
That Janesville Eddie Munster’s managed to turn this into Paul Ryan Mood Watch: “Oh Whatever Do I Feel?”  Paul Ryan 2020: LEADERSHIP!.

 

05.12.16
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One of those stories that makes me feel like Clint Eastwood in “Gran Torino”

Gran Torino Movie Review

Pictured: the author, if he were cool and tough. 

 

Times: 

When it comes to emojis, women can be brides or princesses, paint their fingernails, get a haircut and go dancing in a red dress. If those sound like roles determined by the patriarchy, well, it’s not a new complaint.

But it may be changing. Google wants to add 13 emojis to represent women, and their male counterparts, in professional roles.

“Isn’t it time that emoji also reflect the reality that women play a key role in every walk of life and in every profession?” said a proposal from a team of Google employees that was submitted to the Unicode Consortium, which serves as the midwife to new emojis.

The proposed emojis include women in business and health care roles, at factories and on farms, among other things.

This isn’t a leftist complaint about modern feminism. I think representations do matter, both for personal judgement and societal expectations. Symbols are often as powerful as actions, and changing underlying and even unspoken assumptions about gender roles is important. And it isn’t a complaint about emojis. Communication evolves, and pictograms aren’t exactly a new innovation. I think there can be a discussion about if they (and other text language) actually enhance or degrade communication, but that’s neither here nor there.

It just a reflection of me, and how the world has certainly passed me by. “Emojis? We’re talking about emojis? Of all the damn things…”  Honestly, I’m ok with it. Not because there is anything inherently wrong with the new- there isn’t- but deciding that you don’t have to be up on everything is really liberating. I don’t know if there is an emoji for semi-grouchy complacency, but if there is, that’s my face.