Saturday, January 6, 2018

Fire and Ice

I see the debate over precisely how it is that manmade climate change will destroy the planet rages on.

global warming coolingAll we know for sure is that President Trump, lunatic-at-large, is responsible as he withdrew the U.S. from the planet-saving Paris Agreement on climate change. And since consensus has it that we are all going to die perhaps we should spend a little time contemplating the pros and cons of cooling v. warming. ice harborraging wild fireThe metaphysics alone make my head spin, but better to be prepared.15-time-ice-age-global-warming-covers.w710.h473

So I give you Robert Frost’s poem to contemplate the possibilities.

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

Either way, and with all inconvenient truths aside, Al Gore - Global Warming/Cooling/Change Guru and Love Poodle - will continue to preach his planet saving, morally superior,  carbon-caring religion that forms the basis of his wealth.

the algore black love poodle iceberg_thumb[23]The Al Gore memorial black “love poodle” iceberg was created in 2000 in anticipation of his presidential inaugural in January 2001. Last seen languishing off the coast of Labrador, waiting to be melted by global warming.

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Friday, January 5, 2018

Bombagenesis Friday, Followed By Bomb Cyclone Saturday

As a rule nothing can remove a higher-than-average precipitation weather event from the front page. However the media will make an exception in the event they can dish some dirt on Trump, any person related to Trump or any person once associated with the aforementioned Trump. Therefore this year’s snow-event of the century (Bomb Cyclone! Bombagenisis!!) is going to have to play second fiddle to Fire and Fury! which seems to be a book all about Steve Bannon’s firing and his subsequent fury.

So I leave this FLOTUS Friday thread up to you; feel free to discuss Melania – who is apparently still being held in captivity against her will by the evil king – or feel free to turn your attention toward either the weather or Sloppy Steve™.

I will confess to not being a big fan of Melania’s New Year’s Eve Erdem gown. I preferred last year’s Dolce & Gabbana selection:

melania new year's eve

But then I’ve always been a sucker for a little black dress worn with a simple multi-strand diamond bracelet.

00-holding-melania -trump

As for her return to D.C. outfit: I love the camel Bottega Veneta pea coat, and appreciate the coordination of the oxblood colored Hermès Birkin bag, turtle neck, leather trousers and stilettos. And while nobody could wear them better, I’m a thumbs down on skin-tight pants that wrinkle the moment you move, let alone sit down. So I’ll just focus on the color palette. Which I love.

first-lady-melania-trump-bottega-veneta-new-years-day-celebrity-style

And no, I can’t afford any of them, but it doesn’t bother me that in this great United States of America some people can. Because if that were not the case, we’d all be Venezuela.

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Thursday, January 4, 2018

From Racist Svengali To Media Superhero: It’s Called “Transitioning”

All it takes to go from goat to superhero with the mainstream media is a little Trump bashing. Ergo, yesterday’s white nationalist presidential Svengali, Steve Bannon… 

steve_bannon_cover_time

has morphed into today’s mutant Ninja white patriarchal hero – something a white male could previously do only by “transitioning” to an entirely new  gender.

416418724_4357990111001_caitlynjenner-espy 2015 winnerCaitlyn, 2015 winner of the ESPN Arthur Ashe Courage Award**

They might at least have the common decency to be embarrassed by their sudden adulation of Saint Bannon but that would be asking for some semblance of decency which is clearly beyond their ken.

Michael Wolff, who was apparently tapped to write about the first 100 days of Trump as he was given White House access, has not previously been held in high regard by the MSM. I suppose that could explain why he was chosen unwisely, it would seem, by Bannon himself, I would suspect. A questionable decision in retrospect.

drudge-tweet

Wolff has previously been bashed by none less than the Columbia (his alma mater) Journalism Review and referred to as “blunt,” “pathetic” and “calculating” by various sources. Of course being a pariah of MSM may have served in Wolff’s favor at the time Bannon tapped him for the assignment.

So brace yourself; it will be shark week, which generally runs for a month, commencing with the release of this book next week. This is good for the MSM as they haven’t had much new Russia! Russia! Russia! material for quite awhile now.

I am focusing on something that will not be good news for the MSM, also revealed in Wolff’s book: Peter Thiel Is Exploring The Creation Of A Conservative Cable News Network.

Sources say the billionaire has engaged the wealthy Mercer family about the endeavor. According to a new book, Thiel also explored plans to create a Fox News competitor with the late Roger Ailes.

I would suggest they not hire Steve Bannon.

** Runner up to Caitlyn Jenner:

runner up to caitlyn jenner for ESPY

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Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Better Living Through Chemicals and Technology: Better Mistakes Tomorrow!

I thought I had it all figured out: self-driving cars are being developed to enable the entire population to be stoned and still arrive at their jobs, assuming they have a job, safely.

young bo obama stoned 1981 NYHoney, I’m home!

In the interim, a fierce PR campaign has been conducted via the media echo chamber to ensure everyone that legal pot is having absolutely no negative effect on vehicular accidents in order to continue our progressive march towards the Brave New World.

“Public safety doesn’t decrease with increased access to marijuana, rather it improves,” Benjamin Hansen, one of the authors of the previous study, said in an email. Hansen, an economics professor at the University of Oregon in Eugene, was not involved in the current study.

I’m fairly sure Professor Hansen also believed that Hillary Clinton was going to win in 2016.

Naturally, nobody knows how to interpret the unexpected results of their studies, so they speculate instead:

The authors of both studies suggest that marijuana users might be more aware of their impairment as a result of the drug than drinkers. It’s also possible, they say, that patients with access to medical marijuana have substituted weed at home for booze in bars and have stayed off the roads.

According to Highway Patrol officers in California, where they just ended pot prohibition, that is unfortunately, and obviously, not true:

"You can look at the states that have legalized it and they've seen an uptick in collisions and fatal collisions, so it's definitely a concern for us," said CHP Officer Jonathan Sloat.

Despite that evidence, a new poll shows just 40 percent of Americans believe pot contributes to more crashes. Officer Sloat said public perception has to change because the effects of marijuana are obvious. "What we see behind the wheel is the same thing we see with alcohol. We see an inability to maintain your lane, maintain a consistent speed. Slow reaction time."

Anyway, now I see that all of this is irrelevant as self-driving cars are really not the future after all, but rather computer-assisted systems that tap right into the driver’s brain to “read your mind.” They enable the vehicle systems to react sooner than you can yourself.

The world’s biggest carmakers and technology companies are spending billions of dollars to perfect your ability to drive without thinking. Nissan Motor Co. is taking a different direction -- trying to “decode” your thinking so hands-on driving is more fun.

A test drive of Nissan's Brain-to-Vehicle technology in Atsugi, Japan. Photographer: Camille Lim/ Missan Motor Co.Driver wearing Nissan’s “brain- to-vehicle” bucket

Nissan thinks that manual driving might still be of value to society in the future, saying “driving pleasure is something as humans we should not lose.” I don’t disagree, but somebody better put their thinking hat on because if we’re going to give drivers wired skull caps to read their brains and implement their planned actions faster it would be good idea to ensure there is still something left to read.

brain drugs

And we’ve already got covfefe if they just want to improve people’s reaction time, coffee stupid If we can’t improve the overall quality of the mistakes, I say let it wait till tomorrow.

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better mistakes tomorrow-logo copy_thumb[1]

Tuesday, January 2, 2018

Iran and the Art of the Deal, Obama Style

quote-the-tyrant-is-a-child-of-pride-who-drinks-from-his-sickening-cup-recklessness-and-vanity-sophocles-267982

Now that the new year has blown in with full force, most of the holiday goodies have been consumed and thoughts turn to taking the tree down, we tune back into the news. Or more specifically, the lack of news in the case of the Iranian uprising. Aside from a leaked memo to Fox News indicating panic within the Iranian regime no news source in the U.S. seems to find this much of a newsworthy story.

Why Can’t the American Media Cover the Protests in Iran you ask? Question asked and answered, by Lee Smith (h/t Instapundit) -highlights added:

As widespread anti-regime protests in Iran continue on into their third day, American news audiences are starting to wonder why the US media has devoted so little coverage to such dramatic—and possibly history-making—events. Ordinary people are taking their lives in their hands to voice their outrage at the crimes of an obscurantist regime that has repressed them since 1979, and which attacks and shoots dead them in the streets. So why aren’t the protests in Iran making headlines?

The short answer is that the American media is incapable of covering the story, because its resources and available story-lines for Iran reporting and expertise were shaped by two powerful official forces—the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Obama White House. Without government minders providing them with story-lines and experts, American reporters are simply lost—and it shows.

It nearly goes without saying that only regime-friendly Western journalists are allowed to report from Iran, which is an authoritarian police state that routinely tortures and murders its political foes.”

If the people who donned pink pussy hats to resist Donald Trump are one of the year’s big stories, surely people who are shot dead in the streets in Iran for resisting an actual murderous theocracy might also be deserving of a shout-out for their bravery.

The author is rather brutal to the New York Times,

Yet the Post’s virtual news blackout on Iran was still more honorable than The New York Times, whose man in Tehran Thomas Erdbrink is a veteran regime mouthpiece whose official government tour guide-style dispatches recall the shameful low-point of Western media truckling to dictators: The systematic white-washing of Joseph Stalin’s monstrous crimes by Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty.

And he completely annihilates the rest of the Fake News Networks:

Networks like like CNN and MSNBC which have gambled their remaining resources and prestige on a #Resist business model are in even deeper trouble. Providing media therapy for a relatively large audience apparently keen to waste hours staring at a white truck obscuring the country club where Donald Trump is playing golf is their entire business model—a Hail Mary pass from a business that had nearly been eaten alive by Facebook and Google. First down! So it doesn’t matter how many dumb Trump-Russia stories the networks, or the Washington Post, or the New Yorker get wrong, as long as viewership and subscriptions are up—right?

The problem, of course, is that the places that have obsessively run those stories for the past year aren’t really news outfits—not anymore. They are in the aromatherapy business. And the karmic sooth-sayers and yogic flyers and mid-level political operators they employ as “experts” and “reporters” simply aren’t capable of covering actual news stories, because that is not part of their skill-set.

And then there is this, the pièce de résistance – the entire section is highly notable; and damning:

The current media landscape was shaped by years of an Obama administration that made the nuclear deal its second-term priority. Talking points on Iran were fed to reporters by the White House—and those who veered outside government-approved lines could expect to be cut off by the administration’s ace press handlers, like active CIA officer Ned Price. It’s totally normal for American reporters to print talking points fed to them daily by a CIA officer who works for a guy with an MA in creative writing, right?* But no one ever balked. The hive-mind of today’s media is fed by minders and validated by Twitter in a process that is entirely self-enclosed and circular; a “story” means that someone gave you “sources” who “validate” the agreed upon “story-line.” Someone has to feed these guys so they can write—which is tough to do when real events are unfolding hour by hour on the ground.

The current coverage of the protests sweeping across Iran is bad by design. The Obama administration used the press to mislead the American public in order to win the president’s signature foreign policy initiative. The bill for that program of systematic misinformation is still coming in, and the price is much higher than anyone could have imagined, including more than 500,000 dead in Syria and an American press incapable of understanding, never mind reporting, that this death toll was part of Obama’s quid pro quo for the nuclear deal.

And yet they persist: (responses are interesting)

rice iran

* Lest anyone forget, Smith is referring, above, to Ben Rhodes, Obama’s Senior Security Advisor.

rhodes-obamaap2

John Kerry, BO, Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes members of the Obama Iranian brain trust since 2008

Here’s Foreign Policy Magazine’s (hardly a right-wing publication) profile on him, in which they call Ben “an overweening little schmuck” – their words, not mine – and  discuss the NYT’s article about him (The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru):

"His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility for the fate of nations — like military or diplomatic service, or even a master’s degree in international relations, rather than creative writing — is still startling."

Although nowhere near as startling as the fact that the media just took the creatively fabricated story and ran with it, no questions asked. We covered it here, on MOTUS, at the time in  The Story of O: As Written By a Failed Novelist:

I note this only to illustrate how you can get away with truly remarkable lies if you have the cooperation of the media. Every modern day tyrant has understood that, implicitly…As long as the complicit media goes along with the lie, you can continue to fabricate with impunity:

Like Obama, Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal. He is adept at constructing overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials. He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press.

As Rhodes admits, it’s not that hard to shape the narrative. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” Rhodes said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.” - PJ Media

So in case you’ve ever wondered where the brilliant Obama-era narratives came from, now you know: they came from the M.F.A. program at N.Y.U. and the creative mind of one Ben Rhodes. If the entire 8 years of Obama seemed more like a movie set or a reality show than history, now you know why.

end of asia trip obama_last helicopter out of the philipinesIf this image of Obama reminds you of Close Encounters (of the alien kind) it’s not accidental

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Monday, January 1, 2018

My New Year Prediction

A word of advice to progressives: when you see angels with trumpets…do not think “apocalypse.” Rather think “Hallelujah.”

angels fadeIt is , after all, the year of the TRUMP-et.

2018 is also the Year of the Dog in the Chinese New Year (which begins in February). And guess who is a big Dog: Donald Trump! And that’s a good thing.

1225donaldtrumpchinese year of the dogChinese play tribute to The Donald in the Year of the Dog with this giant statue

Born in 1946, Donald Trump was born in the year of the Dog—the Fire Dog to be specific—according to the Chinese horoscope. It is believed that the Fire Dog is naturally charismatic and easily attracts attention.

trump-rallydallasYa’ think?

At the beginning of 2017 Chinese astrologers reading President Trump’s Rooster Year Four Pillars chart determined him to be an Earth person and predicted that he would be doing things differently. As the Rooster carries a metal element which represents expression and creativity they also predicted that Trump, being an Earth persona, might have a year of sharp words.

when-he-said-the-fake-mainstream-media-hates-that-he-uses-social-mediaAgain, ya’ think?

As far as 2018 goes, the anniversary year of an individual’s birth sign is said to bring good fortune so I predict a whole lot more WINNING! for Donald Trump and America. All I can say is Hallelujah! And Happy New Year.

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Sunday, December 31, 2017

2017 Wrap – The Year of the Anomaly

Donald Trump IS an anomaly. He’s actually doing what he said he would.covfefe cupBut there are others.

  • Anomaly #1: After Obama’s 8 year Apology for America Tour, we not only inaugurated a man who actually loves America, but one who’s not embarrassed about Making America Great Again.

Trump-chinatrump-climate-tweet

I mean, really? A President who tweets? Who does that!? An anomaly of a President who has to deal with an anomaly of a media committed to taking him out, that’s who.

trump tweets social media

mcconell-ryanNot quite man enough for the job

And despite Paul Krugman’s and Thomas Friedman’s predictions the stock market did not collapse:

2017 stock market

Which leads us to:

  • Anomaly #4 Trump rally: Stocks put 2017 in the record books. But don’t worry, the fake news media is busy spinning this as a meaningless anomaly, or worse - the set up for a crash. Because if it’s Trump, fake news cannot allow it to be good. Which brings me to my favorite Presidential tweet of 2017.covfefe

Although, come to think of it, maybe it was the last guy’s presidency that was the real anomaly, you know the black hole that occupied the White House for 8 years:

Black Hole Blend Label- anomoly1All I know is President Trump lied, I’m not tired of winning yet.

trump apologizes tweet(not a real DJT tweet, but it COULD be!)

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