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fapangel · 7 years ago

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I can’t WAIT to cover this Trump Jr. Thing because the lefties are pissing themselves like an excited chinchilla and its just so *precious* III We both know how short, murky, and 'he-said-she-said' the anti-Trump evidence has been, so when one of the few folks Big T trusts outright says he'd love to have an enemy of the US support the campaign with secrets on Hilary... you can see why they'd be excited. What Trump Jr. did by even replying positively to that message was High Quality Stupidity.

So before anything else, let’s take a long momentto enjoy that hysterical chinchilla-pissing, starting with thecomments in my own inbox:

Drumpf has only three options here. Disown hisson and send him on an all-expenses paid trip to NSGB, step down, orget impeached.

(BBC)world-us-canada-40571914 Welp. Donald’s son just screwed himself andhis dad over big time. Meeting someone described as a Russiangovernment official to get dirt on Hillary. And, well, “part ofRussia and its government’s support for Mr Trump”. Ruse or not,the intent from the campaign’s side is clear, and motive goes a longway in an investigation and court. Seems like the best thing to dowould be to throw Goldstone, and maybe Jr., to the investigators anddeny Trump had any awareness?

Now for The Left: After their hysterical, rabidpersecution of Trump failed to turn up anything formonths on end, theiranti-Russian obsession has reached “McCarthy” levels of paranoia(oh, the irony,) soplacing Trump Jr. in the same roomas a living Russian person from Russia fortwenty entire minuteshas them stroking off sofuriously it’s a wonder they haven’t given newly literal meaning to“liar liar pants on fire” yet. TimKaine, Rep.Seth Moulton (D-Mass), thereliably retarded NewYork Timesand theusual sniping from the never-Trump neocon camp are all calling ittreason. That’s aclaim so moronic that Salon.com (yes, Salon) hasan article pointing it out beforehurriedly burying the “vast right-wing collusion conspiracynarrative” theirown site’s been pushingwith the old “all Republicans are morons” line like a wee dogfuriously kicking sand over its scat. Meanwhile, CNN is once again ina class of its own - not because of their hysteria but becausethey’re nowreporting on what their right-wing news competitors are saying:

Raheem Kassam, editor-in-chief of BreitbartLondon, reacted to the story of Donald Trump Jr.’s newly-releasedemails in a way that wouldn’t typically be expected from someone atthe far-right outfit, which is a reliable supporter of PresidentTrump.

“So like, this is straight up collusion,”he wrote in the news outlet’s internal Slack, according to atranscript of the conversation obtained by CNN. “Right?”

Yes. Somehow, CNN knows what Brietbart is sayingon their own fucking internal Slack account. I guess hacking is okaywith CNN when they’re doing it - that is, assuming they’re not justmaking shit up again. But the best lines in that “coverage of thecoverage” were these:

Fox News’ first response was relative silence.While CNN and MSNBC went into full coverage on the story, Fox Newsonly briefly visited the topic before moving on to other news, thenreturning to it later.

Eventually, as the story developed, Fox beganto cover the revelations more aggressively. But the network neverwent into non-stop breaking news coverage as CNNand MSNBC did.

Non-stop, indeed. Given that thefacts can be related in literally 23 words (shady Russian lobbyistscores meeting by promising Trump Jr. Hillary dirt, babbles aboutadoption treaties for twenty minutes before being shown the door,) weall know that it was the same as CNN’s usual “non-stop breakingnews coverage” of anything:

But not that fucking Fox News, oh no! Theyreported the facts,and then moved on and came back later,afterthey’d found more facts,toreport those. Andthey call themselves journalists.Tsk.Therealjournalists are hunting down everyonewho was standing in the room,everyone who might have possibly known someone standing in the room,andlabeling them “mastersof the dark arts.” That is not a joke. That is the actualfucking headline. YERA WIZARD, DONNY! THE VODKA DRINKERSARE COMIN FOR YA! Finally,an immigrant the Democrats don’t like. Maybe extreme vetting would’vefound his DarkMarktattoo in time, eh? Or maybe the Azkabanstamp in his passport? Isthat a wand in yer pocket or do you have Hillary’s e-mails for me? Oh, man. But the absolute bestpart of all this is how they’re pawing at everyone’s shins andwhining and spinning little circles because nobody else wants to play- theWaPo is whining about how Trump’s still bullying them as Fake Newsand CNN’s whiningabout those damn pro-Trump media outlets doubting the meeting evenhappened. How can they keep getting away with it? Maybe becausethe mainstream media is sodistrusted nowthat morethan half of Trump’s supporters don’t even believe the meetinghappened, despite Trump Jr. verifying it andreleasinghis e-mails about it.

Allof this - all the tail-chasing, frenzied yapping and excitedurination - is absolutely hilarious,becauseit all amounts to fucking nothing.If Vladamir Putin himself had been lowered from the sky by a chorusof singing angels, moonwalkedto the top floor of Trump Tower and handed Trump all of Hillary’ssecrets engraved on sacred stone tablets, it’d still amount to jackshit.It’sthe same basic fact that’s undermined the left’s vague “collusion”narrative from the beginning - itdoesn’t matter one damn bit who dug up Hillary’s misdeeds in theelection, because theevidence proves it’s true. Hillarywas damaged by her owncampaign’s internal e-mails - youknow, the bald and unvarnished truth of a fawningmedia’s collusion, solicitations of multimillion dollar campaigndonations from the heads of foreign governments and what Democratsreally think of minority voters. 1 + 1 still equals 2 even ifHitler’s the one drawing it on the blackboard. That’s precisely whythe left has relied on constant dark rumor-mongering using a specificscary word, “collusion,” that connotes all manner of shadydealing and wicked deals on the docks at midnight - even though“collusion”literally isn’t a crime. In other words, Robert Mueller - whomeven WaPo admits is trapped in a rad bromance with Comey, andwho’s staffing his Special Probe withlawyers that donated almost exclusively to Democrats -literally has nothing to investigate. Buteven the court of public opinion can’t convict, because no matter howyou look at it, standing in the same room as two Russians for 20minutes isn’t collusion.

Thedefinition of collusion, accordingto Merriam-Webster, is “secret agreement orcooperation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose.”Note the agreementor co-operation bit. Assenior CNN producer John Bonifield was caughton tape openly admitting, it’s common knowledge that governmentsare alwaystrying to influence politics - and even elections - in othercountries. After all, aCongressional investigation found that Obama’s State Department gavehundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to an Israeli advocacygroup trying to oust Prime Minister Netanyahu (who refused tokiss Obama’s ass on the Iran nuclear deal,) so it’s not a bigsurprise or anything. Nor is meeting with agents of a foreigngovernment, considering that a Ukrainian-American Democratic NationalCommittee operative was caught meeting with theUkrainian embassy in Washington to try and sabotage Trump. Thepredictable justifications (Ukrainians are the Good Guys and Russiaare the Bad Guys) ignore that Ukraine is a big,ugly, corrupt mess, and that the pro-Russian rebels that Putin’spretending his regular Russian army units are actually doexist (just not nearlyin those numbers) and that the Russian intelligence services - andcrony capitalism oligarchy - doubtlessly have tentacles everywhere inthe beleaguered nation. Afterall, left-wingers were whining about Trump’scampaign manager Manafort meeting with Ukrainian businessmen, anda senior Democratic PAC adviser was attacking Scott Walker forreceivingdonations from a “pro-PutinUkrainian businessman,” so clearly they’re not above suspicion- according to theexact same people who were chumming with them, at least!

Lefties havealways known this all amounts to jack diddly shit, which is whythey’ve been using the word collusion,specifically. As I’vesaid before, the way the media get onto the same page - nay, theexact same buzzword, nighinstantly, is never an accident. “Collusion”by definition means “agreement or co-operation.”Governments influencingothers elections by slipping favored candidates tips on theiropponents dirty laundry is nothing new. Governmentsaiding one campaign in return for agreed-upon favors at a later dateis another. Democratsare alleging that Trump and co. sold out to the Russians, so nowthey’re in Putin’s pocket. Thatwas the point of the lurid fanfiction document about Russian hookerspissing on Trump, to allege that he was “vulnerableto Russian blackmail,” and that’s why Democratsand the US intelligence community deliberately spread that pack oflaughable lies around. And they knowthisisan impossibly ludicrous thing to sell, which is why they keeprepeating vague ominous nothings about “collusion” and keepreporting on everything Trump does in the context of the imaginary“ominous cloud” they’ve industriously created themselves for the express intent of throwing shade.

I delayed this post for a bit just to collect morecommentary in my inbox - and not just because it was hilarious(DRUMPF BLOWN OUT ZOMG LOL) but because I hoped it’d be revealing.And indeed it was: consider this one again:

And, well, “part of Russia and itsgovernment’s support for Mr Trump”. Ruse or not, the intent fromthe campaign’s side is clear, and motive goes a long way in aninvestigation and court.

Every single news story I’ve seen on it havequoted almost those exact lines - the Russian’s email proclaiming hispotential offer as “part of Russia and its government’s support,”and Trump Jr’s skeptical approval, “if it’s what you say it is, Ilove it.” This is what they’re trying to spin as “intent tocollude.”

So how about wereadthe actual goddamn emails, eh?

On Jun 3, 2016, at 10:36 AM, Rob Goldstonewrote:

Good morning

Emin just called and asked me to contact youwith something very interesting.

The Crown prosecutor of Russia met withhis father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered toprovide the Trump campaign with some official documents andinformation that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings withRussia and would be very useful to your father.

This is obviously very high level and sensitiveinformation but is part of Russia and its government’s support forMr. Trump - helped along by Aras and Emin.

What do you think is the best way to handlethis information and would you be able to speak to Emin about itdirectly?

I can also send this info to your father viaRhona, but it is ultra sensitive so wanted to send to you first.

Best

Rob Goldstone

There it is, inas many words - an offerto expose Hillary’s shady connections with “Russia.” That’san outright offer to provide dirt - and as LizPeek points out, this offer came shortly after the book “ClintonCash” was published, which exposed a shit-ton of the ClintonFoundation’s lucrative dealings with Russian businessmen. Even theHillaryapologists at politifact couldn’t deny that Bill Clinton receiveda half millionfucking dollar speaking fee forgiving a speech - from a Russian investment bank calledRenaissance Capital which isvery, very much tight with the Kremlin:

Personal connections and a commitment to Russiahave proved critical to Renaissance. Jennings and other execs got toknow many junior officials in the early 1990s who have risen tosenior positions in the Kremlin and at the central bank. RenaissanceDeputy Chairman Robert Foresman has advised state-owned Gazprom,giving him access to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.At a Renaissance investor conference in June speakers includedFinance Minister Alexei Kudrin and Arkady Dvorkovich, aide to RussianPresident Dmitry Medvedev.

Andlet’s not forget Sergei Magnitsky, a Russan lawyer whofingered Renaissance Capital as part of a massive government-involvedtax fraud scheme, was arrested by said government, then murdered inprison to keep him silent. These guys are dirty as hell.

Nospeech, not even from God himself, is worth a half-millionfucking dollars a pop. That’sa hefty ass-kissing “donation”, any way you look at it - and beforeHillary became Secretary of State, Bill pulled down that half-miljust twice. After she became SecState, he got a half-mill forspeeches eleventimes.

Anddid I mention that Bill wasbeing paid a half-million dollars for fucking nothing around the sametime Hillary was pushing for approval for Russiato buy a controlling interest in Uranium One, one of the largesturanium mines in America?

Nowconsider that - given Russia’s crony capitalism/mafia stylegovernment (as exemplified by Renaissance Capital’s tight ties withthe Kremlin) and the constant murder of journalists or anyone elsewho could spill the details on these things (including Magnitskyhimself,) the only people who wouldhave this informationwould be “The Russian Government.” That’sexactly why the email offer mentioned it - it was mandatory to bebait the hook.

Andthis is why the media have very, very carefully omitted that lineabout Hillary’sconnections with Russia, andexactly why Trump Jr. tweeted out the emails himself - becauseit makes it screamingly obvious that his “intent” was to getproof of Hillary’s shady dealings and misdeeds. Hedidn’t promise any favor trading with the Russians, he didn’t promiseto to give them “special consideration,” and he didn’t promise tohost Putin’s fucking birthday party, either. That isn’t“collusion,” by definition.

Mindyou, the Russians were definitely up to no good. The lawyer,Natalia Veselnitskaya, spent all her time in Washington and environslobbying against anti-Russian sanctions -after receiving special clearance to enter the country fromLoretta Lynch herself. (Gee,ain’t that funny?) Oncethere, she spent most of her time trying to lobby for “making itlegal for Americans to adopt Russian orphans again,” banned by aRussian law that was retaliation for what she reallywanted to lobby against, the Magnitsky Act - economic sanctions onRussia, named after the whistleblower murdered after he ratted on thecompany that later stuffed 500 million dollars into Bill Clinton’ssticky pockets. Thiseditorial details why the Magnitsky Act really chaps Putin’s ass,but that act itself,likethe orphans/adoption thing, just a way to open up the topic ofanti-Russian economic sanctions. Considering that the ~masterof the dark arts~Americancitizen lobbyist that translated for her is ex-KGB, and thatNatalia droppedher promised Evidence On Hillary to launch right into her lobbyingspiel, it’s pretty clear what the goal was. Most likely, she wasshilling the same Kremlin bullshit she’d pushed everywhere else, withthe promised Evidence Of Hillary’s Crimes a bullshit lie to get inthe door. Or at absolute worst, she was trying to dangle a potentialpromise of ~evidence~ in return for potential or implied promises ofTrump’s future administration to lower sanctions on Russia (whichhe’s refused to do, by the way.) At best she was wasting TrumpJr’s. time, and at worst she was trying to solicit a deal - i.e.,collusion.

Andthat’s about when Trump Jr. showedher the door.

Evena fucking dog figuresout that you didn’t actually throw that ball after a few seconds oflooking for it, but the media’s still yapping like they finallycaught that invisible car they’ve been chasing. They’reso completely and utterly absorbed by their own narrative thatthey’ve come to believe it themselves. It’d be cute if they weren’tgrown adults with collegedegrees, you know? IfSatan himself had slithered out of a flaming crevasse andhanded Trump Jr. Hillary’s banking statements on a dead-babyparchment scroll, it still wouldn’t fucking matter unless they hadTrump Jr. signature on a contract selling his soul for it. Andwhat they’ve got now is a campaign operative saying “fuck yes Iwant an October surprise to dunk my opponent with!” Andthis is before you getto the Democrats colluding with Ukrainians at the same time they wereattacking Ukrainians on Trump’s side for being evil andsuspicious, before you weigh theClintons having a corrupt Kremlin-complicit bank stuffing cashin Bill’s pocket as Hillary sells out our biggest fucking uraniummine to the Russians, and before you weigh Loretta Lynch personallygiving that Evil Russian Lawyer permission to enter the country inthe first place.

Andthey honestly don’t understand why nobody believes them. Thegiggles that keep on giving. It’s amazing.

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how2to18 · 6 years ago

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THEY SAY literary novelists can’t do genre. This is perhaps most acutely felt with mystery and noir, which has fascinated and occasionally defied postmodern eminences from Pynchon to Auster and beyond. Antony Lamont, antihero of Gilbert Sorrentino’s incredible Mulligan Stew, stands out as the funniest case study, albeit fictional. A fading, minor experimental writer immersed in an awful fusion of the new novel and a noir potboiler (the same sort of novel it seems Paul Giamatti’s character is working on in Sideways — his “Robbe-Grillet mystery”), the pompous Lamont’s tilt is equal parts cynicism and desperation — his radical approach really just a bald-faced cash grab, so smugly assured is he that the dark ambience, gratuitous sex, and abrupt violence of his meandering and largely content-free novel will finally nab him the hit he deserves. This is not, thankfully, the sort of novel that Jonathan Lethem gives us in The Feral Detective. Though you can be forgiven for imagining otherwise if you’re not familiar with his work, Lethem is no stranger to noir, or genre fiction in general — he came from genre, and is, in fact, a genre writer, especially when he promiscuously blends genres together as he’s been doing since his fantastic Philip K. Dick-meets-Raymond Chandler debut, Gun, with Occasional Music. In short, Lethem is a master, the sort of master for whom narratives about genres, as opposed to genres themselves, are the quarry. That he’s reached a high degree of mainstream success within the genre of literary fiction only burnishes his bona fides as a master of form.

The Feral Detective follows Phoebe Siegler, a thirtysomething New Yorker and former Times staffer who has traveled to the West Coast to track down Arabella, the missing daughter of her friend Roslyn. Arabella, a freshman at Reed College, stopped answering Roslyn’s attempts to contact her a few weeks into her first semester, and Phoebe — newly liberated from her job — decides a trip to Portland to pay the girl a wellness call is just what she and Arabella need. Arriving to find her gone and school officials oblivious, Phoebe digs in and discovers a slim trail of several-weeks-old credit card transactions leading down the coast to Los Angeles’s Union Station and finally, cryptically, to a travel plaza purchase in an unfamiliar corner of San Bernardino County, where the lead goes cold. Because she is worried about Arabella, and because she loves her friend — Roslyn is herself a mother figure to Phoebe — and because she is not ready to go back home, Phoebe decides to extend her vacation. The reason she is not ready to face New York — the reason she quit her job — haunts the novel from its first pages:

Blame the election. I’d been working for the Great Gray News organization, in a hard-won, lowly position meant to guarantee me a life spent rising securely through the ranks. This was the way it was supposed to go, before I’d bugged out. I’d done everything right, like a certain first female nominee we’d all relied upon, even my male friends who hated her, as a cap on the barking madness of the world. Now she took walks in the hills around Chappaqua and I’d checked into the Doubletree a mile west of Upland, California.

The Feral Detective is not only a novel of the Trump era, it is a novel largely about it — specifically, how the Trump era has felt for a certain set of us who woke up on November 9, 2016, with a newfound appreciation for the arguments of reality simulation theorists. If noir is at its core fundamentally the cruel stripping away of illusion, there could hardly be a better subject than a liberal coping with the Trump era. So thoroughly and suddenly was the narrative of Hillary Clinton’s inevitable victory evacuated, so traumatic was the puncturing of the optimistic Obama-era bubble, and so bizarre and even nightmarish have been the subsequent years that it’s easy to think of the whole world as having taken a noir-ish turn: worst timeline confirmed, doomsday clock ticking ever closer to midnight. For Phoebe, it is all too much to take:

My room reminded me of a gun moll’s wisecrack, in some old film I’d seen, on entering an apartment: “Early Nothing.” I was left with Facebook, where my friends had responded to the election by reducing themselves to shrill squabbling cartoons. Or I could opt for CNN, where various so-called surrogates enacted their shrill hectoring cartoons without needing to be reduced, since it was their life’s only accomplishment to have been preformatted for this brave new world. Television had elected itself, I figured. It could watch itself too for all I cared. I read my book.

There is, in her quest to find Arabella, more than a little self-interest — it is also a quest to find, if not the fictional world she thought she inhabited, a way to understand the one she never knew she lived in all along.

Her guide in this is Charles Heist, the eponymous feral detective, so called because of his penchant for tracking down lost, troubled, cult-brainwashed, and otherwise disappeared or off-the-grid kids. Working out of a nondescript strip-mall office in Upland, Charles Heist takes Phoebe’s case with a typically non-committal “no-promises” sort of attitude, but also with a decidedly nontypical disinterest in any sort of upfront payment. Other unusual details include the presence in Heist’s office of a wounded possum, which Heist is doggedly though unsentimentally nursing back to health, and a ragged, mute young girl named Melinda, apparently recently and quite literally feral herself. Phoebe is nonplussed but also, she must admit, intrigued — and Charles is a looker in a flinty, sunburnt sort of way:

He resembled one of those pottery leaf-faces you find hanging on the sheds of wannabe-English gardens. His big nose and lips, his deep-cleft chin and philtrum, looked like ceramic or wood. Somehow, despite or because of all of this, I registered him as attractive, with an undertow of disgust. The disgust was perhaps at myself, for noticing.

His services are retained. With nothing to go on except the travel plaza purchase, and a hunch that Arabella — a devoted fan of Leonard Cohen — might have ascended nearby Mount Baldy where the late, great songwriter frequented an isolated Zen retreat, Charles sets out and Phoebe returns to her hotel to brood on the case and the mysterious dashing man onto whose broad shoulders she’s laid her last, best hope.

These introductory chapters are incredible — it truly is a lot of fun to see Phoebe fall so quickly and so hard for Heist. Making Heist the honest and unapologetic object of Phoebe’s post-Obama rebound fantasy is a delicious complication of the femme-fatale tradition, and it’s great to see her unapologetic voraciousness respectfully, even somewhat meekly, received by the terse but game Heist. Lethem wrings plenty of comedy out of the improbable culture-clash romance that rapidly develops between the two, but there is something troubling that develops, too. For a writer who is normally so good with voice and so adept at playing off types while still imbuing his characters with enough specificity and depth to keep them from becoming cartoons, Phoebe begins, as the novel progresses, to feel at times much too broad — a weird gestalt of awkward comedienne, working girl, and other tropes whose presence isn’t entirely exorcised by cheeky self-consciousness:

I’d go home with a California story or two in my back pocket. No, sorry, I didn’t ever set eyes on the ocean or the Hollywood sign, but did I tell you the one about the porta-potty levee? The trailer park blowjob? Oh, what a Manic Pixie Am I! I pictured telling this over late lunch at Elephant & Castle.

Through Phoebe, Lethem means to implicate himself and by extension the whole cohort of urbane, liberal, upwardly mobile folks too assured of victory and too preoccupied with themselves to imagine the failure of their certainties in 2016. But although Phoebe’s preoccupation with what Heist thinks of her, for example, is funny, it began to worry me. On the one hand, it is great that Lethem allows Phoebe to be shallow — as he does — and to seem at times to forget about the search for Arabella while daydreaming about her new gumshoe boytoy — as she does — but is this an unvarnished caricature of complacent white feminism of the sort that both the left and the right now routinely flog for predictable results?

The plot, depending on how well the conceit works for you, congeals, or thickens — it is discovered that Arabella is caught between two warring cultish groups of desert dwellers, the feminist “Rabbits” and the boorish “Bears” and some genuinely funny moments, striking passages, and typically excellent walk-on characters follow. Each band is a primal caricature of the current partisan divide and not much more nuanced than what you’d get from reading Daily Kos or The Daily Caller. It’s mostly burlesque, but there are hints at a deeper reckoning. Phoebe, who spends much of the book in sidekick mode, gets a memorable “flower-pot” moment. The gesture — which Phoebe names after the belated contribution of a corseted heroine in a half-remembered Western she used to watch with her dad, which involved the woman throwing a flower-pot down on the head of a villain from a second-story window — kicks off an extended denouement that pleasurably complicates the existing dynamic between Phoebe and Heist. By the novel’s end, most of my doubts were, if not totally expunged, at least leavened by the complex affection I’d begun to feel for Phoebe.

Heist, a kind of subterranean Trump foil — a paragon of non-toxic masculinity — is the more lovable character, but Phoebe is ultimately more interesting. The feral detective, true to form, spirits Phoebe away from the old assurances and dead narratives to which she reflexively, repeatedly, retreats, even, in the end, the old one about the guy getting the girl, and she realizes ultimately that learning to live in the new world means letting go of the old.

Perhaps the ultimate truth of noir is that no matter where you’re standing, there is always another floor to fall through. If there is a central lesson of The Feral Detective, it might be simply to embrace this fact; as the Cohen-head Arabella might quote: “You want it darker.” Yes, and for a reason. Darkness can be a renewal, death and inversion driving out the old to make space for the new.

Seth Blake is a writer from New Hampshire living in Los Angeles.

The post Always Another Floor to Fall Through appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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foursproutwealth-blog · 7 years ago

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The Skripal Case Is Being Pushed Down The Memory Hole With Libya and Aleppo

New Post has been published on http://foursprout.com/wealth/the-skripal-case-is-being-pushed-down-the-memory-hole-with-libya-and-aleppo/

The Skripal Case Is Being Pushed Down The Memory Hole With Libya and Aleppo

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Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

On the fourth of March, in the sleepy British cathedral town of Salisbury, an ex-spy named Sergei Skripal was poisoned by an assassin with the most deadly nerve agent known to man.

The Russian government was immediately blamed by a shocked and outraged world. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson assured the people of Great Britain that “There’s no doubt” that Moscow was responsible. In a large and sudden leap forward in cold war escalations, Russian diplomats were thrown out of countries all around the globe, including my own Australia, in a show of solidarity with the United Kingdom. It was the largest collective ejection of Russian diplomats in history.

Two months after his earth-shattering assassination, as the world stared spellbound at the weekend’s immensely popular PR spectacle of a royal wedding, Sergei Skripal was quietly discharged from the hospital he’d been staying at. The BBC reports that he is walking and approaching complete recovery.

Wait a second. Haven’t I seen this Python skit before?

So to recap, an ex-spy who had been retired and strategically irrelevant for years was reportedly poisoned by the Kremlin with Novichok, a scary Russian-sounding word which refers to a group of extremely deadly and fast-acting nerve agents that start shutting down the body’s muscles and respiratory system within 30 seconds to two minutes.

Except in the case of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia it was several hours with a leisurely stroll, a meal, and beers in between.

The poison was placed in Yulia Skripal’s suitcase. Actually no, they got that wrong, it was the air vents in their car. Wait, no, that doesn’t work either. Maybe it was administered via weaponized miniature drone! Wait, no, it wasthe family’s car door handle. Actually, scratch that, it was the front door of the house. Definitely the front door of the house. We’re absolutely sure. Either that or Sergei Skripal’s favorite Russian cereal. They were given 100 grams of Novichok. Wait, no, that’s ridiculous, we retract that. Okay, maybe we have no idea what happened. Oh hey, their pets were completely unaffected by the poison. Let’s incinerate them.

Oh, and Johnson’s claim that the Porton Down laboratory had assured him “There’s no doubt” that Russia was behind the poisoning? Turns out that was just a bald-faced lie; Porton Down said no such thing and it was never its job to make such an assessment. Johnson lied, and both the Foreign Office and British mainstream media attempted to cover it up; tweets were deleted, transcripts were re-written, and narratives were given a good spin of historic revisionism by asserting that the UK government’s unequivocal insistence that the Kremlin poisoned the Skripals had been merely a “suggestion”.

And now both Sergei and Yulia Skripal, alleged victims of a poisoning by highly trained assassins using the deadliest nerve agent ever created, are doing fine.

But you’re still supposed to fear and hate Russia. Just don’t think too hard about it or remember too much.

Remember Aleppo?

I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t; corporate media outlets hardly ever talk about it anymore. It’s almost like they want us to forget the horror stories they told us about how the city that had been occupied by good, noble freedom fighters was about to be taken by an army of depraved psychopaths who wanted to rape women, burn children alive, and shoot civilians in their homes. Back at the tail end of 2016, though, it was all you ever heard about. The “fall of Aleppo”, they called it. If the west didn’t intervene to stop Damascus and Moscow from retaking East Aleppo from the good-hearted rebels, everyone there would be raped, tortured, and butchered by the soulless army of the Syrian government.

Well, Moscow and Damascus did recapture East Aleppo, and it turns out that everything we were told about it was a lie. The atrocities the Syrian Arab Army were accused of intending to commit proved to be completely unfounded, those “freedom fighters” were predominantly cruel Al Qaeda affiliates, and the city is now thriving and bustling with busy marketplaces. But after all the constant apocalyptic alarmism, the mass media outlets who’d been warning of all the horrific crimes against humanity which would surely be committed after the “fall of Aleppo” forgot all about the city once they were proven completely wrong about everything.

Aleppo was pushed down the memory hole. It’s a non-thing now. Turns out Gary Johnson was ahead of the curve.

How about Libya? Remember Libya? Libya’s that country that got pushed down the memory hole the second the western empire got the regime change it was after. Before Muammar Gaddafi was mutilated in the streets to the sadistic cackles of Hillary Clinton, we were all told with increasing urgency that humanitarian interventionism was needed because Gaddafi’s troops are doing evil things like taking Viagra to help them commit mass rapes against Libyan civilians. Now Gaddafi is dead, we know that both thecase for humanitarian interventionism and the Viagra-for-rape stories were lies, and Libya is a humanitarian disaster with an open slave trade after western interventionism created a failed state.

Where are all those cries for humanitarian interventionism in Libya now? Now that the nation is infinitely worse off than it was under Gaddafi?

Doesn’t matter. Memory hole.

Time and time again, we’re fed these deceitful narratives to manufacture support for the agendas of the western war machine, and when the truth begins to surface that we were lied to once again, the news churn moves on and we’re distracted with something else as the old narrative is shuffled back beyond the reach of memory.

Maybe a year or two later we wonder to ourselves “I wonder what ever happened with that major news story? I should google it,” but nothing comes up and most of us shrug and move on.

And now a very suspicious and possibly Christopher Steele-related silence has descended on the matter of the Skripals, to the point where Sergei himself can walk out of the hospital and barely cause a blip in the news, and nobody can talk to either of them but everyone pretends that’s perfectly normal. This case which points very clearly to a mountain of lies and cover-ups by the British government and its affiliates is now being shuffled out of the news cycle and replaced with vapid nonsense about Meghan’s dress and Trump’s latest obnoxious tweet.

“Unlike everybody else in the media, I have no intention of letting go of Salisbury because the international ramifications of the Salisbury poisoning affair are too grave to allow them to be pushed out of the news by a Royal Wedding, by Wimbledon or whatever else it is..” pic.twitter.com/7KScziA2M2

— George Galloway (@georgegalloway) May 4, 2018

But we won’t let them forget. We won’t let the world forget that these steadily increasing imperialist escalations against Russia and its allies were given a hefty bump by lies about what happened in Salisbury. There are plenty of people on alternative media like me who will keep pointing at that big dark hole of unanswered questions and yelling “Hey! What about all those lies you guys told us about the Skripals?”

This one isn’t going down the memory hole, guys. There are some turds that just won’t flush. This one’s staying around forever. We’ll keep reminding everyone. We won’t let anyone forget.

#Wealth

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domenicwhl68197-blog · 7 years ago

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Dealing With Characteristic In Papaya Herbal Tea.

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thedeadshotnetwork · 7 years ago

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Cory Booker Loves Donald Trump One warm Saturday afternoon last month in a ballroom in the convention center in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, a local business leader introduced Cory Booker as a man “who may be our next president.” Booker, the tall, solidly built former mayor of Newark, the current junior senator from New Jersey and somebody people have been pointing to as a potential occupant of the Oval Office for going on half his life by now, rose from the dais, enveloped the space behind the lectern and proceeded to unleash an hourlong stem-winder. The attendees at the state NAACP convention were a friendly, expectant audience, and Booker is good at this part of being a politician—voluble and excitable but compelling to the point of kinetic, gesturing with his hands, widening his eyes, planting and replanting his well-worn loafers and intermittently using a white handkerchief to wick the sweat from the top of his shiny bald head. The people in Raleigh were rapt. They laughed when he wanted them to laugh. They hushed when he wanted them to hush. They were near tears when he wanted them to be near tears. And they responded throughout with knowing nods and church-like murmurs of assent. Given the buoyant vibe, it was easy to lose sight of the fact that what Booker was saying was highly unusual. At this moment of extreme political discord, it was even quite radical. The crux of his message was the importance of love. “Patriotism—let’s get to the root of the word—means love of country. And you cannot love your country if you don’t love your country men and women ,” Booker told them. “Love says everybody has worth and has dignity. It’s about looking at someone and … understanding that my destiny is interwoven with your destiny,” he continued. “You can’t lead the people if you don’t love the people.” And toward the end of his speech, Booker arrived at the nub. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “I’ve given an entire speech, and I haven’t mentioned the name of the president of the United States.” He still didn’t. “And you know why? Because it’s not about him.” His voice rose. “It’s about us!” The people clapped and cheered. “We’ve got all the power we need!” “We do!” somebody shouted from the crowd. “Don’t be one of those people I catch calling our president nasty names,” Booker said. “I’m serious. How can you think that you’re going to beat darkness by stealing darkness? If Nelson Mandela can love his jailers, if Martin Luther King can love Bull Connor—we’ve got to be people of love!” They cheered again. Booker over the years has talked a lot about love. “Consistent, unyielding love .” “An unbelievable amount of love .” “Crazy love … unreasonable, irrational, impractical love .” And for the better part of this decade, Booker has landed frequently on a particular phrase—the “conspiracy of love.” It’s a phrase he employs with an almost religious fervor—a combination of a guiding-light mantra and a permanent political slogan. He uses it to tell his story, from the suburbs of New York City to Stanford to Oxford to Yale. He uses it to tell the story of his family, from the poor, segregated South to the upwardly mobile comfort of the business and intellectual elite. And Booker uses it to tell the story of a country that has overcome its anguished, divided past by nurturing the bonds between white and black instead of stoking the dissension. Since at least 2011, he has used the phrase on panels and podcasts, in talks to credit union executives and furniture bosses, in campus lectures and at college commencements. He used it last year as an energetic surrogate and short-listed vice presidential possibility for Hillary Clinton. In his recently published book, called United , it’s the title of the first chapter. For some, though—including some members of his own staff—the repetition can elicit snickers and sighs. “In some circles,” Patrick Murray, a pollster at New Jersey’s Monmouth University, told me, “he’s known as Senator Conspiracy of Love.” And to those less loyal, it can trigger the kind of criticism that has tracked Booker throughout his 20-year political career—that he’s too cute, too corny or too clever, that he seems polished to the point of performative, that he’s more interested in soaring oratory than the relative drudgery of governance and legislation. “Long on vision, short on granularity,” as the former head of the Newark Alliance once said . But as saccharine or contrived as it might sound to some, those who know Booker the best insist it is nevertheless him. “It’s something that is really genuine and authentic to who he is as a person and how he views the world,” said Mo Butler, a former chief of staff. “It’s in his DNA,” Booker’s pastor, the Rev. Dr. David Jefferson of Newark’s Metropolitan Baptist Church, added. And so, if Booker runs for president in 2020—and he told me, for the record, it would be “irresponsible” to say at this time whether he will or he won’t—it’s hard to imagine that it would happen without millions of people beyond New Jersey and Washington, D.C., hearing him talk about love, and about the “conspiracy of love.” What chance, some worry, would Booker’s “conspiracy of love” have against an opponent who wields as one of his most powerful weapons a schoolyard talent to demean? David Axelrod, the former strategist for Barack Obama, has theorized that voters seek in their next president not a replica of the predecessor but a remedy—and a Booker candidacy certainly would present a stark contrast, assuming President Donald Trump is the Republican incumbent. If Booker does vie for the highest office, he will encounter a number of obstacles. Conservatives think he’s too liberal, and liberals tend to think he’s too conservative. His coziness with Wall Street rankles his party’s left flank. He has championed school choice, atypical for a progressive. He has had one notable brush with scandal—an accusation, which he denies, that he took a salary from a law firm that did business with Newark. And he’s 48 and single, a teetotaler and a vegan , with a monkish, ascetic streak, all of which might strike many in Middle America as odd or unrelatable. But then there is this—the open question of whether the love-talking Booker is the right fit at a time when angry, rattled Democrats are hankering for combative, fight-fire-with-fire, anti-Trump rhetoric. And the Democratic gains in Tuesday’s elections in Virginia , New Jersey and elsewhere have only fueled that rage. What chance, some worry, would Booker’s “conspiracy of love” have against an opponent who wields as one of his most powerful weapons a schoolyard talent to demean? “ What conspiracy of love?” former Trump campaign adviser Sam Nunberg told me. “That won’t work,” he said. “You use the word ‘conspiracy’ when you’re trying to sell books or movie tickets, not a political candidacy.” As even an informal slogan, Nunberg said, it’s fatally flawed because it’s not sufficiently simple. “It’s no ‘Make America Great Again.’” Still, said Democratic consultant Joe Trippi, a veteran of presidential campaigns: “We tend to go to the opposite as a country, and so when you look at the antidote to Trump’s divisive rhetoric, then Cory Booker—who he is, the way he talks, including this phrase—does set up kind of an opposite instinct of Trumpism.” But what if voters want retribution, not forgiveness? Perhaps Booker’s focus on love is just too soft, or simply too religious for a party that prides itself on inclusiveness but gets uneasy when the message sounds like it’s plucked from the Gospels. But if Democrats are to find Booker appealing as a top-of-ticket candidate, they’re going to have to get used to his pacifist-in-a-bar-fight style. “FUCK YOU,” somebody on Twitter told Booker earlier this year. “LOVE YOU,” he responded . *** The Capitol Hill offices of most members of Congress are richly appointed, the desks, shelves and walls covered with personal mementos, certificates of achievement and grip-and-grins with presidents and celebrities. Not Booker’s. Along with drab chairs and a picture of his parents, there’s a small statuette of the abolitionist and humanitarian Harriet Tubman, a small drawing of Martin Luther King Jr. and a photograph of Mahatma Gandhi. Booker’s space on the third floor of the Dirksen Senate Office Building is (to use his word) “austere.” When I visited him there earlier this fall, I was reminded of working a number of years ago on a story for Men’s Health about Booker, who at that time was well into his second term as mayor. We met at his apartment . The mostly bare walls and sparse, thrift-store decor gave it an almost dorm-room feel. “I’m not a big stuff person,” he told me now in his office on the Hill. Booker is an ideas person, and the “conspiracy of love” is his biggest, most animating idea. It is, he said, “a family ethos.” And his family history in some sense has prepared him to make the argument that we’re all in this together whether we like it or not. According to genealogical research done in 2012 by Henry Louis Gates’ PBS show, “Finding Your Roots,” Booker is 45-percent European —white. On his mother’s side, his grandfather was a freckled, red-haired bastard born in 1916 to a woman Booker knew as “Big Mama,” who had been impregnated by one of the white doctors in her small town in Jim Crow Louisiana. Deeper into the family tree, Booker has a great-great-great grandmother who was owned by her own father. These, he told Gates, are “the complicated, painful, amazing, wondrous stories of America, how they all mix to produce us.” It went beyond blood, too: Booker’s father grew up poor in the black part of Hendersonville, North Carolina, the son of a single mother who became ill and overwhelmed—and so was taken in by the family that ran the town’s black funeral home. A church collection plate helped pay for his first semester of college at North Carolina Central University. Booker’s father in the ‘60s and ‘70s climbed the corporate ladder at IBM, as did his mother, among the first African-Americans to do so, aided by civil rights foot soldiers of the Urban League. They were able to purchase their house in almost entirely white Harrington Park, New Jersey, thanks to fair housing activists who outsmarted a realtor who didn’t want to sell to them on account of their skin color. For Booker’s parents, his mother, Carolyn, and especially his father, Cary, who died in 2013, all of this added up to a “conspiracy of love.” It’s a term Booker’s older brother, also named Cary, recalls hearing around the house in their teens, he told me. And so when Booker graduated from high school as an honor student and standout football prospect, and when he graduated from Stanford with a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s in sociology, and when he earned a Rhodes scholarship, and when he got his law degree from Yale, and when he started running for and then winning political offices—at every milepost of accomplishment—the message from his parents always was the same. “I grew up,” Booker told me, “with the understanding that, ‘Boy, you didn’t get here on your own—you got here through the collective love of millions and millions of people.’” Robin Kennedy, wife of former Stanford President Donald Kennedy, told me she heard these stories the year Booker lived with them as barely a 20-year-old undergrad. So did Jody Maxmin, a Stanford professor of art, art history and classics, and one of Booker’s mentors. Ditto Andra Gillespie, who met Booker at a lecture he gave at Yale in 2001, wrote a book about him and is now a political scientist at Emory University. “He saw in his father’s origin story,” Gillespie said, “a model for what could happen if communities came together.” “We are,” Booker wrote in United , “the result of a grand conspiracy of love.” The word conspiracy today evokes immediately nefarious connotations, but Booker likes the juxtaposition of conspiracy and love . In the context of 2017’s poisonous climate, it’s “subversive,” he told me. “Defiant.” It packs, reminiscent of Tubman, Gandhi and King, “a humble radicalism,” he said. This is a phrase powerful enough to topple even the most oppressive institutions—slavery, imperial England, federally enforced racism in this country—and therefore perfect for the test Booker confronts now in Trump. But to win, he must tap into what he calls this nation’s “reservoirs of love.” “Does any of your reservoir of love flow toward the White House?” I asked him in his office. “To President Trump?” “I am so determined to fight and stop Donald Trump,” he said, “whether it’s taking health care away from millions of people, whether it’s putting in place a Muslim ban that I just find discriminatory and bigoted, whether it’s doing what he’s doing with our EPA or our DOJ . I want to fight him. But he will not … I’m not going to let him turn me into that which I want to fight against.” “Meaning,” I responded, “you are going to fight him, but you are not going to hate him—therefore you love him?” “Yeah,” Booker said. “I readily admit that.” I want to fight him,” says Booker. “But … I’m not going to let him turn me into that which I want to fight against.” Is loving Donald Trump, for a Democrat, right now, or ever, for that matter, really a winning political strategy? Booker basically told me I was asking the wrong question. “What,” he said, “are you defining as a triumph?” Winning elections. Not moral victories. In other words, for Democrats, a one-term Trump presidency—maybe even shorter than that. “But I’m talking about the real end that we seek,” Booker said, “which is the raising of the quality of life, bringing about greater justice, a greater sense of liberty for all—what our ideals are.” *** Booker always has been an uncommon combination of undisguised ambition and unflagging idealism. And he often has expressed those two aspects of his life in roundly religious terms. “I’m the most ambitious person you’d ever meet,” he told a reporter for Newark’s Star-Ledger in 1998, during his first City Council bid. He felt, he said, like he was “part of a really righteous campaign.” He absorbed his religious precepts early and well. As a boy in Harrington Park, Booker went every week to the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Closter, New Jersey. “My mom taught Sunday school,” Booker’s brother told me. At Oxford, though, Booker served as a co-president of a Jewish organization, the L’Chaim Society. When he moved to Newark as he was finishing his course work at Yale Law, to be a public-interest attorney, representing and organizing tenants, while eyeing a spot on the City Council, he began attending Metropolitan Baptist. It’s where he still goes, every Sunday he’s not in Washington or traveling somewhere else, usually seated for the 9:30 service in a pew near the front behind the wife of the pastor. “Cory,” the Rev. Dr. David Jefferson told me, “is very, very, very, very faith-driven.” When he ran for mayor in 2002, challenging the shrewd Sharpe James, who had held the office since 1986, his professed righteousness seemed almost comically overmatched. James called Booker a carpetbagger. He called him an Uncle Tom. He called him “a faggot white boy.” He suggested Booker was both Jewish and funded by the Ku Klux Klan. “Cory Booker isn’t for real,” said James’ ads. The race was the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary named Street Fight . For Booker, it was a jolting introduction to political attack tactics, which he told me he considered “despicable.” But he had a choice to make. He called his pastor. “A lot,” Jefferson told me. “A lot. A lot. I mean … a lot.” Jefferson, Booker said, “reminded me who I am, and reminded me of who I aspire to be.” “He and I would have conversations about the Bible,” Jefferson said, “the whole notion as to what Jesus did.” “Jesus,” Booker told me, “was somebody that took unrelenting abuse and criticism [from] powerful people using their position to try to destroy him reputationally and ultimately physically.” The reality, though, in 2002 was that Booker lost. James, twice Booker’s age, won 53 percent of the vote. Booker was subdued but undeterred, convinced his strategy of more or less turning the other cheek would win out in the end. “Let us show our dignity,” he told his supporters the night of the loss, “by being gracious in this minor defeat.” Booker was elected mayor in 2006, when James sensed an approaching loss and bowed out. Jefferson told me it’s still not about winning or losing elections for his most famous congregant, which is exactly the kind of a thing a campaign manager would never say. “Cory’s contribution to public service and wanting to serve is deeper than just being an elected official,” his pastor said. “He really has a calling, and he believes that.” And that is? “And that is to do basically what Dr. King spoke about,” Jefferson said. “To love humanity by serving individuals. To be great by being able to serve. And you can’t serve unless you love.” To love those he serves? “ And those enemies that he has … He believes, as I do, too,” Jefferson said, “you will never overcome that with the same mentality, the same attitude—that what overcomes that will be the conspiracy of love.” When I asked Booker about what his pastor said, he told me, “Frankly, you can say Jesus was crucified—and I can say Jesus transformed the planet Earth, that his gospel transformed planet Earth, and has inspired generations of justice advocates to make change, from Gandhi being inspired by the teachings of Christianity to activists like Martin Luther King. So I do think that is the right path to walk, regardless of what you encounter, regardless of what happens to you—is to not let someone’s hate turn you into a person of hate, but to let yourself endure, no matter what, to be a person of love.” Back in 2008, in a piece in which a writer for Esquire labeled him a “wannabe savior,” Booker said he always wanted to be “a part of a spiritual revolution” and that “we need a prophetic leader—who can raise us above our baser angels.” Last summer, in his speech at the Democratic National Convention, he said “we are called to be a nation of love.” It prompted Trump to take a swipe. “If Cory Booker is the future of the Democratic Party, they have no future!” tweeted the then-Republican nominee, days after he had said in his own convention speech that the legacy of Hillary Clinton was “death, destruction and weakness.” “I know more about Cory than he knows about himself,” Trump added. If Trump’s cryptic broadside left some scratching their heads, Booker’s comeback did the same, only more. “I love Donald Trump,” Booker said on CNN. One of the hosts spoke on behalf of probably most of the viewers with her soft, almost reflexive response. “ What ?” *** Dirty cars and trucks on Interstate 280 raced past the fenced-in children’s playground, creating a noisy, distracting, exhaust-choked backdrop for a news conference—which was the aim. Booker had come here to Newark’s McKinley Elementary School one morning last month to unveil a bill he was calling the Environmental Justice Act . One way to parse his policy priorities these days is of course through the lens of a potential presidential candidacy—his stand with Senator Bernie Sanders for Medicare for All, for instance, was viewed widely as a nod to those on the left who consider him too far to the right—but another way to see his activities is to consider what is in essence Booker’s unified field theory. Environmental justice reform , criminal justice reform , raising the minimum wage , even the legalization of marijuana —it’s all part of the “conspiracy of love.” And while Booker did not utter the actual phrase at the playground at McKinley, he did use the idea to frame his proposed legislation. “Really, I want to start with this understanding that we’re all in this together,” Booker said into a microphone to the small gathering of community business and political leaders scattered among the swings and slides. “If there’s anything that I’ve learned about this nation’s ideals, from the hallmark of our country, e pluribus unum , to the spiritual reality of our nation, of diversity, of many different communities, it’s that we’re all integrated into one common destiny, and that injustice anywhere is indeed a threat to justice everywhere.” When Booker was done talking, two local reporters had questions. They asked basically the same thing: Why did he think he could turn this bill into law? Booker, after all, is a junior senator in the minority party. But this skepticism felt rooted, too, in the recent history of this city. Booker was the mayor here from 2006 to 2013, when he won a special Senate election to replace the late Frank Lautenberg—after which he was re-elected in 2014 to his current six-year term. During his time as mayor, Booker worked to become one of the best-known mayors in America, hopscotching the country giving often lucrative talks, stockpiling Twitter followers, starring in the Brick City television show on the Sundance Channel and demonstrating an ongoing penchant for publicity stunts like bringing diapers to homebound citizens in snowstorms. His record on the ground was more complicated. Through his charisma and connections, he attracted to the city, and especially to the downtown core, a mixture of corporate headquarters, hotels, restaurants and grocery stores. But unemployment remained higher than the state and national rates. Under Booker’s leadership, crime in the city went down—then it went back up. There were budget cuts. There were tax hikes. Citizens groused. In 2006, he won his election with 72 percent of the vote. In 2010, that went down to 59. And one of the signatures of Booker and his administration, the education reform efforts with a $100-million infusion from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg plus another $100 million in matching funds from other wealthy private donors and venture capitalists, in the end spurred only marginal improvements in student performance. “Two hundred million dollars and almost five years later,” Dale Russakoff wrote in her book about it, The Prize , “there was at least as much rancor as reform.” Newark, if nothing else, is a bright-lights lesson in how hard it is to make change. The question for Booker is now what it’s always been: How, exactly, does he turn this kind of lofty rhetoric into actual reality? Responding to the local reporters at McKinley, his first instinct is more rhetoric. He invoked American history and the bold improbability of civil rights legislation. Environmental justice, he said, was no different. “I believe that when this stuff starts to prick the moral imagination of the country, we’re going to get this legislation done.” The question for Booker is now what it’s always been: How, exactly, does he turn this kind of lofty rhetoric into actual reality? Now, in the back of his black SUV, pulling away from the school, he added to the thought. “I’m just telling you. I’ve heard people tell me things are impossible before,” he told me. “And I’m not saying that Newark doesn’t still have a lot of work to do. But my experience is that the impossible is possible.” He was talking, again, at base about faith. King, one of his go-to exemplars, “pricked” America by weaving scripture and secular ideals to craft a single moral imperative that couldn’t be dismissed. And so here I asked Booker: Would he be willing to run for office—whether in a Senate campaign or for president—in an even more explicitly religious way? “I’ve studied Judaism, Hinduism, Islam and obviously my own Christianity,” he said. “It’s the core of everything I do. And I don’t shy away from it. I think Democrats should get much more comfortable being conversant in issues of faith and calling to whatever your moral text is, be that just a secular text, like our Constitution, or be it the Quran.” But at this juncture when the mantle of religion in politics has been so scrambled by Trump, would Booker, I wondered, run as, say, a Baptist progressive? Here, though, he was “reticent,” he said. Why? “I don’t want to turn people off.” Booker’s idealism often arrives in great torrents of words. Reminders of the ambition that accompanies it can be more succinct. *** People have been talking about Booker being the president since he was in law school. “I am not prone to overstatement,” Doug Lasdon, the founder of the Urban Justice Center in New York, told me. Booker was a summer intern for Lasdon in the late ‘90s and stayed with him at his apartment. “And I visited my dad,” Lasdon said, “and he said, ‘You know what’s he like?’ And I said, ‘Dad, this guy could be president of the United States.’ And I’ve certainly never said that about anybody else, but it was obvious—his character, his intelligence, his sense of empathy.” In Newark, people talked about Booker being the president already when he merely was running for City Council out of the Central Ward. Former Councilman Anthony Carrino used to say, “‘Hey, watch this guy, watch this guy, watch this guy—he might be president one day,’” former councilman and mayor Luis Quintana told me. “I said, ‘What, are you kidding? He just got off his Hot Wheels!’ I said, ‘You want him to be president?’ He was running for City Council!” And in 2002, when Booker was running for mayor for the first time, Marshall Curry heard it all the time when he was making Street Fight . “I can’t tell you how many people told me, ‘Cory Booker’s going to be the first black president, Cory Booker’s going to be the first black president,’” he told me. Then, of course, Booker wasn’t. Barack Obama was. And then the first black president led to President Donald Trump. Trump has used the word love as well—“so much love in the room,” he said at charged rallies—but it isn’t quite the same thing. So Booker has an opening in 2020 he wouldn’t have had if Clinton had won. If Axelrod is right that Americans vote for polar opposites, then Booker—who is about as different from Trump as Trump was from Obama—might be the man for the moment. Maybe too polar, say many other veteran hands. No one wants to come out against decency, but the gears of experienced political minds—Booker’s colleagues and veteran campaign strategists—click audibly when you ask if they think you can craft a platform on love. There’s a "but" wedged into almost every answer. New Jersey Republican Rep. Tom MacArthur doesn’t doubt Booker’s talk of the “conspiracy of love” is “sincere,” he told me, but he added: “The object of government is not to sit around a campfire and sing Kumbaya . The object of government is to advance things that are really going to benefit people’s lives.” Is there appetite within this battle of ideas for tenets of love? “My heart tells me, ‘Yeah, we’re ready,’” said Rep. Donald Norcross, a New Jersey Democrat. “My head says, ‘Let’s see what happens.’” “I’ve got to think people are looking for some empathy and compassion,” said Sen. Joe Manchin, the moderate Democrat from West Virginia, who counts Booker as a friend. Strategists and consultants from both parties are wait-and-see about Booker’s approach. “Substantive change for the better cannot come from anger and resentment—they are fundamentally destructive impulses,” Reed Galen, a Trump critic who worked on the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and also John McCain’s, told me. “But you can’t just be out there saying it’s all sunshine and rainbows.” “I don’t know that ‘conspiracy of love’ wouldn’t work … but it won’t work on its own,” added Bob Shrum, the longtime Democratic strategist. “It depends on what he says and whether he’s believable. And we won’t know that unless or until he gets out there.” Iowa and New Hampshire await should Booker choose to run. The politically wired in those two key states say he isn’t nearly as known there as he is in Washington and the Northeast. People know just enough to know they want to know more. “The conspiracy of love? It makes me smile,” Jerry Crawford, an attorney and a Democratic kingmaker in Des Moines, told me. “That’s going to play better in Iowa than in D.C. It’s positive when we need positive.” It makes Sean Bagniewski, the chair of the Polk County Democrats, think of Obama’s “audacity of hope,” he said. The conspiracy of love? “I think it would be more likely the activists here would say, ‘Huh?’” New Hampshire might be harder. “I think New Hampshire Democrats are like Democratic activists elsewhere,” UNH political scientist Dante Scala told me. “They’re in a fighting mood right now.” The conspiracy of love? “I think it would be more likely the activists here would say, ‘Huh?’” In Newark, back in Booker’s SUV, I asked him about all this. “I hear Democrats often say this, that Republicans are so mean … we’ve got to stop being so nice,” he said. “I’m, like, ‘That’s 100-percent opposite to what we need to be.’ We don’t need to take on the tactics that we find unacceptable in the Republican Party. That doesn’t mean we don’t need to fight hard and make sacrifices and struggle and battle—but we do not need to take on the dark arts.” What, though, if that’s what people want ? After all, he was praised by his party when he broke with Senate tradition to rebuke his colleague Jeff Sessions during his confirmation hearing. No one is going out of their way to praise him for being openhearted about Trump. “It’s a natural human inclination,” he said. But he added: “It’s not what we preach in churches on Sunday mornings, in synagogues on Friday nights, in mosques during the call of prayer.” He bemoaned the fact that he was “lambasted” for giving the cancer-stricken McCain a hug this past summer. “Do you think President Trump needs a hug,” I asked, “and are you the person to give it to him?” Booker laughed. “I think President Trump,” he said, “needs a lot more than a hug.” November 10, 2017 at 10:33AM

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furederiko · 7 years ago

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The closing chapter of a trilogy, but also a prologue to a whole new cosmic adventure...

This year, Marvel Studios has released three movies. "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" in May, "Spider-Man: Homecoming" in July, and of course, "Thor: Ragnarok" in... November. Yep, the last one opened yesterday in my country, meaning we local Marvel fans in several Asian and European countries got lucky and had it around a week earlier than the American. These three movies are different to one another in tone and taste. However, they also had one thing in common: the sensation is hard to put into words.

General consensus for "Thor: Ragnarok" calls it as loads of fun or a riot. That's not wrong, because Marvel Studios indeed delivered its funniest movie yet (it had me LOL-ing real hard yesterday). In a year where most comedies failed to hit the stride? THAT alone is an achievement. But it's also more than just a comedy. It's a dark dramedy, if I can be more specific, though I'm not even 100% sure if that's the most accurate term. You see, the events happening in this movie is DARK. Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige was true to his words, because the movie is wrapped in a game-changing condition. A sure end to the Thor trilogy.

Thor Odinson (Chris Hemsworth, who else?) shines in what is easily the best feature in his solo trilogy. If you've been following this character ever since his debut in "Thor", then you would be excited to see how far he has become. The growth in this character is amazing, whether personally or in relationship with others. At long last, the God of Thunder lives up to his namesake and legacy. One that sadly comes with major costs.

Fans of the Incredible Hulk (the great Mark Ruffalo) is in for a treat as well. Much like how "Captain America: Civil War" intertwined the story of Steve Rogers and Tony Stark, Bruce Banner had his fair share in this movie as the second major Avenger. He and Thor even shared a wet fan-service scene that will make any fans blush in laughters. You'll be sooo thrilled to see how different Hulk had shaped up after the events of "Avengers: Age of Ultron". Fans might have shown a degree of hostility towards that movie, but one will easily admit, various elements from it plays out as crucial factor in Hulk's trajectory.

Loki Laufeyson (the ever charming Tom Hiddleston) was a tricky scene stealer in his brother's first two movies. That position has been taken away by the new characters in this one. It doesn't mean that he's been eclipsed or something like that. Suffice to say, Loki is still mischievous as always and important for the plot, but at the same time he also gets an unexpected redemption in his own way. I'm sure his devoted fans, and also those others who favors to ship these two adopted-brothers, would be more than happy with what they see here.

Rounding up the returning cast, we have Heimdall (the famous Idris Elba), Odin (the legendary Anthony Hopkins), and... several others. The first gets to do way more, with much better importance than his previous appearances. I love how Heimdall's ability to see everywhere anywhere is put to good use. The latter, gets to deliver a more casual interpretation of the great Al-Father, and is in involved in the movie's most iconic moments. The movie also reveals a very interesting facet of this character that will surprise any fans of the movies, which is a somewhat grand departure from the source material. There are also other returning characters who show up, but talking about them means dwelving into spoiler territory, so I won't go that route. Regardless, if there's any part of the movie I'm not too fond of, it's definitely concerning these minor ones.

The new characters, are simply astonishing. Director Taika Waititi gets the privilege to introduce them to the Marvel Cinematic Universe for the first time, and because of that, they all exude his quirky personalities in different ways. Hela (scenery-chewing Cate Blanchett), is literally the Goddess of Death. She's imposing, and a scary antagonist with a shocking connection to the Asgardians. Most of her scenes take place in Asgard for the 'Ragnarok' part, being galaxies away from Thor, Hulk, and their friends who are busy with the 'Planet Hulk' part. She spends more time with Skurge the Executioner (a bald Karl Urban), thus igniting some negative feedback from critics. I feel Blanchett does fantastic work in this character. The issue here, is actually due to Hela being in charge for the more serious moments, while audience will easily pay more attention to the fun and glorious rampants of the protagonists.

And then there's Scrapper 142 (the super-talented Tessa Thompson), or The Valkyrie as she is widely promoted. She is a scene stealer who excites audience with her strong and couldn't-care-less persona, both in serious and comedic moments. Many will be comparing her to a recent DC super hero that debuted her solo movie this year, and I'm not surprised. It's hard to say how amazing she is, because I want to respect the actress' personal dislike of a particular phrase (Valkyrie is indeed ba**ss, though. Sorry Tessa... LOL). So I'm going to just sum it in this sentence: she totally rocks! The Grandmaster (the one and only Jeff Goldblum) is vying for the top spot. He might be one of the utmost perfect casting in Marvel Studios' history. Unlike his brother The Collector (played by Benicio del Toro) who has debuted before him, Grandmaster is just... an endless hillarious hoot. Most of the scenes with him had me cackling and giggling like lunatic. I totally can't wait to see him appearing in future movie. Moreso, interacting with that equally eccentric brother. Oh, and have I mentioned the Kronan warrior Korg (motion-captured and voiced by Waititi himself) and his BFF Miek? Brilliant, simply brilliant loveable characters. Nuff said. Lest not forget the fantastic cameos from those unexpected actors. Dang it, if only Liam is part of this too... ;D

This movie is not perfect. It started a bit shaky, particularly during that scene between Thor and Surtur (voiced by Clancy Brown). It picked up as soon as the setting changes though, so not to worry. Also, as I said before, some of its emotional moments are toned down by the humor. Oddly, in a way this also works, because once you stop and think about it, the main storyline is actually really dark, devastating, and depressing. Probably even more than a certain DC movie released March next year. However, on a positive note, this IS Waititi's signature style. If you've seen any of his previous movies, you'd know for sure that they often dealt crushing and heartbreaking moments with casual smiles and some laughters. Waititi doesn't turn them into an overly dramatic moment, but treats it realistically and as humanly as possible. This is the aspect that might NOT work with everyone.

The two post-credit scenes are also a bit of... an acquired taste. I won't spill the details, but here's some hints. The mid-credit one is a WTH moment that wraps the movie in a massive cliffhanger, likely leading towards next year's "Avengers: Infinity War". The post-credit one? Think of it along the line of the first "Guardians of the Galaxy". Yet despite the flaws I've just stated, somehow I'm dying to see more. When the end credits popped out, I just couldn't believe my eyes. Partly realizing how more than 2 hours had flown so quickly, and the other half because I still wanted to see more and more. I walked out the theatre feeling a bit disappointed, not because the movie was bad, but because it left me craving for another serving.

So allow me to wrap this up by circling back to what I said at the beginning. This movie is hard to describe, simply because that's the way it is. It's rich with flavours, those of laughters, sadness, epicness, tension, even deaths, and destruction. It had amazing nods and continuity call-backs to previous MCU movies, but is still highly enjoyable and LOL-worthy for newcomers. It's a riot, loads of fun from start to finish, a weird and playful piece in a very Waititi-way. It's also a bold, brave, boisterous move that advances the Asgardian lore and its characters forward. And I'm not kidding here, because "Thor: Ragnarok" marks the end of his solo trilogy, but at the same time heralds a new age for Thor and his companions. Does this mean we can expect another movie from this team in the next 'Phase'? If it's a genuine delight like this, then I sure hope so...

Overall Score: 8,3 out of 10

#movie #marvel #Marvel Studios #thor #thor: ragnarok #review #awesome #Just for Fun

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samanthasroberts · 7 years ago

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‘None of the old rules apply’: Dave Eggers travels through post-election America

From dazed election night revellers in Washington DC to a gay Trump voter in Detroit to kids in Kentucky … The US writer gauges the mood of a divided nation

The word surreal is overused and often wrongly used, but in the case of the Washington Post Election Night Live party, the word was apt. First of all, it was a disco. There was a DJ playing a frenetic mix of contemporary Top 40 and pointedly apropos songs such as Pat Benatars Hit Me With Your Best Shot (Youre a real tough cookie with a long history ). Behind the DJ there were dozens of screens showing various television networks coverage of the election. The screens were so bright and so huge, and the colours so primary and vivid, that the experience was like being trapped inside an enormous jar of jelly beans.

Women dressed like Vegas showgirls made their way through the crowd with towering tiered hats adorned with chocolates from one of the evenings sponsors. The chocolates, round and the size of strawberries, were offered in pairs, enclosed in loose plastic sacks a bizarre but perhaps intentionally lewd optic? The bartenders were setting out Campari Americanos by the dozens. The food was by chefs Jos Andrs and the brothers Voltaggio. The Washington Post has a right to celebrate the paper is thriving and its political coverage extraordinary but this felt like Rome before the fall.

At some point early on, the music was turned down for 20 minutes so Karen Attiah of the Post could moderate a live conversation between the current German ambassador, Peter Wittig, and former Mexican ambassador Arturo Sarukhan. The talk was serious and enlightening, but the ambassadors seemed baffled by the nightclub atmosphere, and besides, few people were listening. The party was about the party.

And everyone expected Hillary Clinton to win. The attendees were largely Washington insiders lobbyists, staffers, legislative aides, pundits and producers. Most were liberal and most were confident. The nights only potential for suspense centred around whether or not Clinton would take some of the toss-up states, like Florida and North Carolina. When she was declared the winner which was expected before the partys scheduled end-time of 10 oclock there would be talk of who would be appointed what, with a not-insignificant portion of the partygoers in line for positions in the new administration.

Thus the mood was ebullient at seven oclock, when the event started, and was electric by eight. Kentucky and Indiana were announced for Donald Trump and that news was met with a shrug. More scantily clad women walked through the rooms serving hors doeuvres, and soon there were at least three showgirls wearing hats of towering testicle-chocolates. Young Washingtonians swayed to the music. Drinks were set under chairs and spilled. A young girl in a beautiful party dress walked through the drunken partygoers looking for her parents.

Then nine oclock came around and the party began to turn. Most of the states thus far had gone for Trump. None of these victories was unexpected, but the reddening of the national map was disheartening, and the margins in those states were often greater than expected. He took Texas, North Dakota, Kansas, Mississippi. Not a problem for the crowd, but by 9.30, people were panicking. Trump was leading in Florida and North Carolina. Nate Silver, the statistics shaman who had been roundly criticised for overestimating Trumps chances, now posted that a Trump victory was likely. Ohio was in the bag, Pennsylvania was trending toward him, and it looked like he could win Wisconsin and Michigan. A hundred guests turned their attention from the big screens to their little screens. They paced and made calls. The party emptied and we all spilled into the streets. Beyond the Washington Post building and beyond DC, the country had been swamped by a white tsunami few saw coming.

Election night at The Washington Post. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images

For a few hours, the city had the feeling of a disaster movie. People scurried this way and that. Some wandered around dazed. Following the returns, we travelled from restaurant to bar to home, and the Somali and Ethiopian cabbies were stunned, worried less about Trump than about the prospect of Rudy Giuliani serving in the cabinet in any capacity. We all talked about where we will move: Belize; New Zealand; Canada. We no longer knew our own country. In Columbia Heights, when the election was settled, a young woman biking up the hill stopped, threw her bike into the middle of the road, sat on a kerb and began weeping. No no no no, she wailed.

The omens were there if you looked. A month before the election, Id driven from Pittsburgh to the Philadelphia suburbs and saw nothing but Trump/Pence signs. In three days I covered about 1,200 miles of back roads and highway some of the prettiest country you can find on this continent and saw not one sign, large or small, in support of Clinton. The only time any mention of her was made at all was on an enormous billboard bearing her face with a Pinocchio nose.

I did see Confederate flags. James Carville, the political strategist, recently quipped that Pennsylvania is Pittsburgh and Philadelphia with Alabama in between, and there is some truth to that. There are a lot of men in camouflage jackets. There are a lot of men out of work. When you stop at gas stations, the magazine sections are overwhelmed by periodicals devoted to guns, hunting and survival. Then there are the tidy farms and rolling hills, the equestrian centres with their white fences, the wide swaths of Amish and Mennonites and Quakers.

I was in rural Pennsylvania to see the United 93 National Memorial in Shanksville a monument to the 40 passengers and crew who died in a windswept field on 9/11. The day I visited was bright and clear. The surrounding country was alive with autumn colours and, far on distant ridgelines, white windmills turned slowly. Just off the parking lot, a park ranger in forest green was standing before a diverse group of middle school students, admonishing them. Boys and girls. Boys and girls, he said. Youre standing here where people died. There are still human remains here. Youre goofing around and laughing, and I shouldnt have to tell you to be respectful. They deserve that. They quieted for a moment before one of the boys nudged another, and the giggling began again.

Trump supporters rally in Oceanside, California. Photograph: Bill Wechter/AFP/Getty Images

The memorial is beautifully constructed and devastating in its emotional punch. Visitors can walk the flightpath of the plane, a gently sloping route down to the crash site, which is separated from the footpath by a low wall. Its a grave, another ranger explained. So we dont walk there. Higher on the hill, there is an indoor visitor centre that recreates every moment of the day in excruciating detail. There are video loops of the Twin Towers being destroyed, fragments of the plane, pictures and bios of every passenger, details about the calls they made from the plane once they knew they would die. It is shattering.

Leaving the museum, a man in front of me, young and built like a weightlifter, couldnt push the door open. I reached over him to help and he turned to thank me. His face was soaked with tears. I got into my car, shaken but heartened by the courage of the 40 humans who had realised what was happening that they were passengers on a missile headed for the White House or Capitol building and had sacrificed their lives to save untold numbers in Washington DC. The American passengers of United 93 were from 35 different cities in 11 different states, but they died together to save the capital from incalculable loss of lives and what might have been a crippling blow to the nations psyche.

I left the memorial and turned on to a two-lane road, part of the Lincoln Highway that runs through the state part of the first coast-to-coast highway in the United States. Just beyond a sign advertising home-grown sweetcorn, there was a residential home, the first house anyone might encounter when leaving the United Memorial, and on this home, there is a vast Confederate flag draped over the front porch.

Its important to note that this was the Lincoln Highway. And that the civil war ended 160 years ago. And that Pennsylvania was not a state in the Confederacy. So to see this, an enormous Confederate flag in a Union state, a mile from a symbol of national tragedy and shared sacrifice, was an indicator that there was something very unusual in the mood of the country. Ancient hatreds had resurfaced. Strange alliances had been formed. None of the old rules applied.

The Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Mark Makela/Reuters

Steven McManus has come out of the closet twice. First as a gay man, then as a Trump supporter. We were sitting at a coffee shop in Detroits Eastern Market neighbourhood, and McManus was almost vibrating. This was two days after Trumps election, and McManus was elated about the victory, yes, but more personally, about the fact that after Trumps election, hed had the courage to post a message on social media declaring his support of the president-elect.

I lived a lot of my life as a closeted guy, McManus said, and the liberation I felt as a man coming out was similar to how I felt coming out for Trump. You really truly think youre the only one who has these feelings. Its liberating. I felt it was time to come out again.

McManus is a thin man in his late 30s, bald and bespectacled, with a close-cropped beard. He grew up in the part of the Detroit suburbs known as Downriver. Many of the areas residents had come from the American south in the 1940s to work in the auto factories, and the area still retains a southern feel. His father was a salesman who brokered space on trucking lines. Looking back on it now, McManus appreciated the fact that his parents could raise five children on one salesmans salary. But then came the Nafta, and the gutting of much of the Detroit auto manufacturing base. McManus watched as Detroit and Flint hollowed out and caved in.

Trump was the only candidate talking about the trade imbalance, McManus said. Being a businessman, a successful businessman, he understood why business decision-makers, at the highest levels of their companies, move their production overseas. McManus was angry when auto companies, after receiving bailouts from the US government in 2009, continued to move production to Mexico. In Detroit, we gave America the middle class. But this is now a false economy. The housing market is decimated, and the middle class is shrinking. I want someone to shake it up. Lets move the whole country forward.

McManus is not blind to the rareness of an openly gay man supporting Trump. But I dont have to vote a certain way based on my sexuality. In my mind weve moved beyond having to vote Democrat just because youre gay. And hes not worried about a reversal of the hard-fought right to marriage gays just achieved. Weve got our rights now, he said. Its settled. McManus and his husband got married three years ago in New York, before the supreme court decision legalised gay marriage nationwide, and it was in his new place of domestic tranquillity that McManus watched the Republican national convention. Two moments affected him profoundly. First was the appearance of Peter Thiel, the former CEO of PayPal, who was given a prime speakers spot and said from the stage, Every American has a unique identity. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all, I am proud to be an American.

McManus was moved then, but he was even more affected by an unscripted part of Trumps speech. It was shortly after the Orlando massacre, and for the first time in my life, a Republican candidate for president said things like, forty-nine wonderful Americans, or beautiful Americans or whatever he said, were savagely murdered. And he said, I will protect gay and lesbian individuals. Some people at the convention cheered and some people didnt cheer. And then Trump said, off the cuff and off the teleprompter, he said, For those of you who cheered, I thank you. And I cried. I cried.

McManuss husband works for the army, as an IT specialist, and they both became bothered by Clintons email setup. If my husband had done the same thing, hed be fired. And its pretty hard to get fired from a government job. McManus began to follow Trump more closely, and found that he was agreeing with most of hispositions on trade, immigration and national security. I began to realise that Im more conservative than I thought. But he couldnt reveal this. He lives in Detroit, a liberal city, and works in the restaurant industry in town, where left-leaning politics dominate. But after coming out as a Trump supporter, he is finding himself emboldened. The day after the election, McManus saw his doctor, who is Muslim, and he mentioned that hed voted for Trump.

I just wanted to get it off my chest. I was feeling a little McManus sits up in his chair, to indicate the new confidence he felt that day. I told him, I came out as a Trump supporter today. And he went off for 15 minutes to the point where I almost walked out. He was impassioned about how he felt that Trump was disenfranchising Muslim-Americans. But our present state of terrorism does have a religious undertone to it. Finally I managed to get something off my chest. I cant remember who said this to me, either my husband or my ex, but I said to my doctor, You know, it wasnt a group of Catholic nuns that flew planes into the World Trade Center.

Proud to be a Republican Peter Thiel. Photograph: ddp USA/REX/Shutterstock

Later that night in Detroit, I ran into Rob Mickey, a professor of political science. He grew up in Texas, but has spent about 10 years teaching at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. We were at a party benefiting an educational nonprofit. Doing something concrete and positive felt good, and being around kids felt good, but everyone was exhausted no one had slept since the election and 30 seconds into every conversation it turned to Trump, Clinton, what had gone wrong and what would happen next. One of the events attendees had been living in a central American cloud forest for years, and there was much talk about following her down there.

I told Mickey about McManus, and to him, the story of the gay Trump supporter was both surprising and unsurprising. Everything about 2016 was upside down. Parts of Michigan who had voted twice for Obama had turned to Trump. Rob and his wife Jenny had gone canvassing for Clinton on the Sunday before the election, and the reception they received was not warm.

I would say it was hostile, he said.

They had gone to Milan, Michigan, an overwhelmingly white town 50 miles southwest of Detroit. Its spelled like the Italian town, but pronounced MY-lan, Rob pointed out. The Clinton campaign had given Rob and Jenny a list of names and addresses of white working-class residents who had registered as Democrats but were labelled sporadic voters. Milan had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, and winning towns such as Milan was key to delivering a Clinton victory in Michigan.

The homes they visited were run-down, with No Soliciting placards on every door. They saw no Clinton signs on anyones lawn. There were Trump signs scattered around town, but most of the residents they met were disgusted by the entire election. One woman said, I dont want to have nothing to do with that, Mickeyrecalled. Another said, I hate them both, including that guy of yours. When I pointed out that our candidate was a woman, she said, Whatever and slammed the door.

One house with a Bernie Sanders sign on the lawn looked promising. Mickey knocked on the door. A white man with a US ARMY shirt answered. He was missing an arm. Mickey introduced himself as a Clinton canvasser, and told the man he had supported Sanders, too, during the primary. Thats great, the man said, and closed the door.

The people we met that day were straight out of central casting, if you were making a movie about the disaffected white working class, Mickey said. Between 55 and 65, without college degrees. You could see that Lena Dunham and Katy Perry were not going to do anything to form a bridge to these people. If I hadnt read any polls, and I was basing it just on the people I met, I would have thought, boy, Clintons going to get wiped out.

It was different in 2008. Knowing that Michigan was securely in Obamas column and Ohio was on the bubble, Rob and Jenny went to Toledo to knock on doors in trailer parks and housing projects. Foreclosure signs were common. When they introduced themselves as canvassers for Obama, the residents, all of them white, were welcoming and chatty. The interactions were long, Mickey said. The people were worried and they wanted to talk. Ohios 18 electoral votes went to Obama in 2008 and 2012.

This campaign wore a lot of people down, Mickey said. The state was bombarded by pro-Clinton ads, but she failed to offer any sustained and coherent economic message. She said, Im not crazy and Im not a sexist racist pig, but for working class whites thats not enough. I would say that of the people who slammed their doors on me, most of them didnt vote for either candidate.

A Hillary Clinton supporter applauds her televised concession speech. Photograph: Steven Senne/AP

In fact, an unprecedented number of Michigan voters cast ballots without choosing either Clinton or Trump. This kind of voting happens every election where voters make their preferences known down-ballot but dont mark anyone for president but never in such numbers. In 2012, there were 50,000 Michigan voters who declined to choose any presidential candidate. In 2016, there were 110,000.

Clinton lost Michigan by 13,107 votes.

The week after the election, the business of the United States went on. Schools and banks were open. The stock market plummeted and rose to a new high. Commuters commuted, and I was headed from Detroit to Kentucky. All of this was travel planned months before, and none of it had anything to do with the election, but it felt like I was making my way, intentionally, into the heart of Trump country.

At Detroit airport it was impossible not to feel the tragedy of Tuesday as having realigned our relationships with each other. Because the voting had split so dramatically along racial lines, how could an African-American or Latino pass a white person on the street, or at baggage claim, and not wonder, Which side are you on?

The emergence of safety pins to symbolise support for Clinton (and equality and inclusion) was inevitable it fulfilled a need, particularly on the part of white Americans, to signal where they stand. Otherwise all iconography is subject to misinterpretation. At the airport, I found an older white man staring at me. His eyes narrowed to slits. I was baffled until I realised he was looking at my baseball hat, which bore the logo and name of a Costa Rican beer called Imperial. Was this man a Clinton supporter who suspected me of being a white nationalist? Was the word Imperial sending a Ku Klux Klan/Third Reich signal to him?

Anyway, I was in the wrong terminal. I was in danger of missing a flight to Louisville, so I left and poked my head into a Hertz bus and asked the driver if he would be stopping near Delta anytime soon. He paused for a moment.

Yeah, Ill take you, he said.

His name was Carl. He was a lanky African-American man in his 60s, and we rode alone, just me and him in this enormous bus, for a time. He asked how I was doing. I told him I was terrible. I was feeling terrible, but I also wanted him to know which side I was on. He laughed.

A traveller in Detroit airport. Photograph: Jim Young/REUTERS

Yeah, I was surprised on Tuesday, too, he said. But I almost feel sorry for Trump. I dont think he thought hed actually win. You see him sitting next to Obama at the Oval Office? He looked like a child.

In Louisville, three days after the election, I sat with 32 students at Fern Creek high school. This was supposed to be a regular classroom visit by someone passing through, but the atmosphere was different now. The students at Fern Creek are from 28 countries. They speak 41 languages. There are refugees from Syria, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. We sat in an oval and ate samosas. Nepalese samosas, I was told. Three of the students in the class were from Nepal, and had a particular recipe. The food was extraordinary.

I told these students, three girls still learning English, that Id always wanted to go to Nepal, and asked them to write down some places theyd recommend. They wrote Jhapa, Damak (Refugee camp). They were from Bhutan and had grown up in a UNHCR camp in eastern Nepal. A young man to my left had come from Iraq two years earlier.

Their teachers, Joseph Franzen and Brent Peters, guided the conversation through topics of creativity, social justice and empathy. The students were without exception thoughtful, attentive and respectful of each others opinions. Every time a student finished a statement, the rest of the class snapped, Beat-style, in appreciation. We didnt talk politics. For the time being, the students had had enough of politics. The day after the election, theyd had a charged discussion about the results, and, still feeling raw, they had written about the discussion the next day.

The thing I didnt say yesterday was that Muslims scare me. The thing with Isis is out of control and I dont trust them at all and I dont get why Mexicans cant take the test to become legal? Are they lazy?

The election didnt really bother me even with the outcome, I didnt support Trump. The main reason I cared about Clinton winning was cause I didnt want my family to be affected. My mom is gay and married to a woman.

As a Muslim female in high school its hard to deal with this and let it sink in. But I know Trump doesnt have full power of his actions. So I feel like even if hes president, everything will be the same.

I was downright disappointed in the country. Because Trump won, racism, sexism, misogyny and xenophobia won. It goes to show what our country values now. Either this is what we value, or this is what the majority is OK with.

I feel like everything said yesterday doesnt even matter anymore. We as American citizens cant change whats been decided. Not everybody gets what they want. Thats what life is. Trump will be our new president and we cant change that. WE need to make America great again, NOT Trump. Thats our job as people.

I think Trump and Hillary are both crazy and Im kind of eager to see how trump runs this b—h.

And so we see how differently we express ourselves on paper. The students, sitting in their oval with the smell of Nepalese samosas filling the room, were unfailingly kind to each other. But on paper, other selves were unleashed. Despite the many international students, the schools population is mostly American-born, 48% white and 38% black, and it was easy to see how Trump could bring dormant grievances to the fore, could give licence to reactionary theories and kneejerk assumptions. The students had witnessed eight years of exquisite presidential self-control and dignity, and now there would be a 70-year-old man in the White House whose feelings were easily hurt, who called people names, and who tweeted his complaints at all hours, with rampant misspellings and exclamation marks. Our only hope will be that the 100 million or so young people in American schools behave better than the president. A president who has not read a book since he was last required to. Think of it.

After the class, a tall African-American student named Devin approached me. Hed introduced himself before the class, and had asked some very sophisticated questions about using imagery to convey meaning in his poetry. He was a wide receiver on the schools football team, he said, but he was also a writer. He handed me a loose-leaf piece of paper, and on it was a prose-poem he wanted me to look at.

We sat on top of my house, laying back, looking at the stars, the stars shining, waving back at us. They told us hello. Time froze. I turned my head to look at you. Still fixated on the stars, you paid me no mind. I studied you. This was the true face of beauty. Your royal blue eyes, the brown polka dots on your face. Your smile making the moon envious because it could not compare in light. I reached out to grab your hand. You turned your eyes to look at me. Our hands intersected and we both smiled. I told you you were were beautiful.

Below the piece, Devin wrote, in red ink, Do I have something here? Should I continue?

Anti-Trump Protesters march through Los Angeles on 12 November. Photograph: UPI / Barcroft Images

That night in Louisville there was another benefit event, this one for an organisation called Teach Kentucky, which recruits high-achieving college graduates to come to the state to teach in the public schools. Joe Franzen and Brent Peters are among Teach Kentuckys recruits, and if they are any indication of the quality of humans the organisation is attracting, the programme is a runaway success.

At the event, Franzen and Peters spoke about their craft, and about making sure their students felt they had a place at the table. There was much talk about their classrooms as families, of meals shared by all, of mutual respect. It was very calm and heartening, but there was also a moment where the audience was encouraged to let out a primal scream (my idea, I admit it), and 200 people did that, screamed, exorcising our election-week demons. Later on, Jim James Louisville resident and leader of the rock band My Morning Jacket performed a medley of songs, from Leonard Cohen to All You Need Is Love and Blowin in the Wind. And then everyone got drunk.

There was good bourbon. It was called brown water by the locals, and after stomachs were full, we all vacillated between despair and measured hope. But the questions loomed over the night like the shadow of a Nazi zeppelin. Would he really try to build a wall? Would he really try to exclude all Muslims? Would he actually appoint a white nationalist as his chief of staff? And did 42% of American women really vote for a man who threatened to overturn Roe v Wade and who bragged about grabbing them by the pussy? Did the white working class really elect a man whose most famous catchphrase was Youre fired? Like a teenager with poor self-esteem, the American people had chosen the flashy and abusive boyfriend over the steady, boring one. Weve had enough decency for one decade, the electorate decided. Give us chaos.

It is not easy to get a ticket to Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. This is the newest museum on the National Mall in Washington, DC, and its design, by the Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye, is so successful, at once immediately iconic and bold but also somehow blending into the low-slung surrounding architecture, that it has become the most talked-about building in the United States.

Admission is free, but there is a six-month wait for passes, and the passes are timed. If you get a pass, you must enter at the assigned hour or wait another six months. I had gotten such a timed pass, and it so happened that the pass was for the day after the election. That morning, I had the choice between staying in bed, forgoing my one chance at seeing the building in 2016, or rising on three hours sleep and keeping the appointment. Like millions of others, I did not want the day to begin. If I woke up, I would check the news, and if I checked the news, there would be confirmation of what I had remembered foggily from the night before that the people of America had elected a reality television host as their president. I closed my eyes, wanting sleep.

Then I remembered the Gazans.

Back in April, I had been in the Gaza Strip and had met a married couple, Mahmoud and Miriam, journalists and activists who badly wanted to leave Gaza. I had e-introduced them to an asylum lawyer in San Francisco, but from 7,000 miles away, she couldnt do much to help. The impossible thing was that they actually had a visa. A real visa issued by the American state department. All they had to do was get out of Gaza. But permissions were needed from the Israelis or Egyptians, and they were having no luck with either. Finally, one day in October, an email arrived. Mahmoud and Miriam were in Brooklyn. Theyd bribed an Egyptian guard at the Rafah gate and had made their way on a 14hour journey through Sinai.

National Museum of African American History and Culture. Photograph: Michael Barnes/Smithsonian Insitution

So on a lark I told them to meet me in DC. Frederick Douglass had said, after all, that every American should visit the nations capital at least once. And given they would soon be Americans, wouldnt it be good to do that duty right away, and do it the day after the first woman had been elected president? (We had made the plans a week before.)

So they had planned to meet me at this museum celebrating African-American history in the shadow of the obelisk dedicated to George Washington, great man and also slaveowner. The morning was clear and cool. A small line had formed outside the museum before the doors were to open. I looked around, and didnt see them. Then I did.

They were aglow. Theyd spent their lives in an open-air prison of 141 square miles, and now they were here. They could move about freely, could decide one day to go to the capital of the United States and be there a few hours later. No checkpoints, no bribes, no Hamas secret police. Id seen Miriam suffer in Gaza because she refused to wear the hijab and favoured western clothes. In Gaza City, she was yelled at, cursed. I hope your parents are proud! people yelled to her. Now she was herself, uncovered, dressing as she chose. H

Source: http://allofbeer.com/2017/10/21/none-of-the-old-rules-apply-dave-eggers-travels-through-post-election-america/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2017/10/21/none-of-the-old-rules-apply-dave-eggers-travels-through-post-election-america/

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oldguardaudio · 7 years ago

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Lloyd Marcus -> Watching Maxine Waters stand at the podium lying through her teeth

Lloyd Marcus @ HoaxAndChange.com

45th President of The United States Donald Trump wins HoaxAndChange.com

Lloyd Marcus – A black conservative – Hoax And Change

Lloyd Marcus

For our 40th wedding anniversary, Mary and I have been experiencing the grandeur and majestic beauty of God’s creation in Alaska. Did you know bald eagles are brown for 5 or 6 years before their head turns white? I was surprised by Alaska’s bountiful foliage and multi colored flowers. From towering glaciers to skies, mountains and seas painted in gorgeous blues by God, we saw numerous breathtaking beautiful scenes. In 1867, Secretary of State William H. Seward purchased our 49th state for only $7.2 million. It was a Trump-of-a-great-deal. Critics called the deal “Seward’s folly.”

In our cabin, I was jolted back to ugly reality by MSNBC, one of the three available TV news channels. Folks, I continue to be amazed by the level of hate that MSNBC has for Trump and their commitment to removing him from office.

Further blowing my beauty of Alaska high was a press conference in which despicable human being Maxine Waters announced Democrats’ plan to impeach Trump for criminal activities. There is not a shred of evidence supporting Waters’ accusations. Watching Maxine Waters stand at the podium lying through her teeth about all of Trump’s supposed crimes was disgusting. Waters and her Democrat minions are horrible enemies of the American people and must never be voted back into power again.

Trump has been totally awesome; fulfilling campaign promises and moving the ball forward towards making America great again. In only six months, Trump has dramatically chipped away much of Obama’s mountain of regulatory overreaches http://nws.mx/2vbT3Rr ; created jobs bit.ly/2k5thrN; opted us out of an anti-American climate deal http://cnb.cx/2qHbSZh and restored power back to states and We the People. bit.ly/2ux7UIh

Democrats/Leftists are out of their minds with rage, desperate to stop Trump’s swift and steady dismantling of Obama’s legacy of government tyranny.

This is why the Democrats and fake news media tag team continue the relentless promotion of their absurd lie that Trump used Russia to steal the election. 1. It is impossible for Russia to tamper with our vote counting. 2. Fake news media either under-reported Hillary’s multiple crimes and breaches of national security or told us they were no big deal. Fake news media thought it had successfully protected Hillary and duped voters, confident she would win in a landslide.

Hillary lost because she was a cold calculating tired old hippie wicked witch Leftist who said it was okay to abort a baby, moments before birth. Thank God, this vile woman is not seated in that powerful chair in our Oval Office.

Maxine Waters’ and her minions demanding that Trump be impeached is equivalent to throwing crap against the wall, hoping it will stick. For the Leftists’ impeachment scheme to work, they must destroy Trump’s popularity. Fake news media’s strategy is to flood the airways with empty accusations of criminal activity. They throw character assassination grenades at Trump 24/7. Fake news media bombards us with reports of supposed nationwide protests. Fake news media manipulate polls to create the illusion that Trump’s appeal is sinking. bit.ly/2vvYIky Fake news media is doing everything in its power to sell their lie that Americans regret voting for Trump.

A standard practice of Democrats and fake news media is to brand anyone who dares oppose their extreme socialist/progressive agenda a racist, stupid, corrupt or crazy. Leftists claim Trump is obviously crazy and must be impeached. So, because Trump is functioning like a savvy businessman rather than an impotent Republican, Leftists say he must be crazy. Sadly, we cannot count on wimpy Republicans to have our president’s back.

My fellow patriotic Americans, We the People are Trump’s firewall; the only thing blocking Waters’ and her minion’s impeachment crap from sticking. The good news is Waters and her homeys are clueless regarding our rock-solid connection with Trump and why he won our votes in an electoral landslide.

Leftists laughed, mocked and underestimated Ronald Reagan. Fortunately, they are repeating their mistake with Trump as he continues to kick their butts under their upturned noses.

During Trump’s run for the WH, I recorded a parody of the O’Jays’ “Love Train” titled, “Trump Train”. bit.ly/2nILInB Folks, it is extremely crucial that we who elected our president stay firmly seated aboard the Trump Train.

Lloyd Marcus, The Unhyphenated American Author: “Confessions of a Black Conservative: How the Left has shattered the dreams of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Black America.” Singer/Songwriter and Conservative Activist http://LloydMarcus.com

Music

Lloyd Marcus’ Trump Train American Tea Party Anthem We Are Americans

MORE MUSIC

Press

“The Bible promises, “Let us not grow weary in well doing, for in due time we will reap a harvest.” Folks, I don’t know about you, but I do grow weary. More pundits are acknowledging that Obama is the worst, most evil, and radical leftist president in U.S. history. My frustration is no one is stopping him from behaving like a lawless banana republic ruler, transforming our once great nation and corrupting the thinking of our youth. God’s promise of reaping a harvest keeps me strong in the battle for the heart and soul of my country.”— Lloyd Marcus, The Unhyphenated American, American Thinker, Oct 10, 2015

Lloyd Marcus -> Watching Maxine Waters stand at the podium lying through her teeth Lloyd Marcus -> Watching Maxine Waters stand at the podium lying through her teeth

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adambstingus · 7 years ago

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34 Men Discuss Society’s Insane Double Standards That Favor Women And Hurt Men

Found on AskReddit.

1. If women sexually harass us, its seen as amusing rather than rapey.

One night in a bar, this incredibly drunk, incredibly skanky woman started fucking grinding on me while I was just trying to sit and drink a beer. Rubbing her gross vag all over my pant leg, and generally being disgusting and inappropriate. While this was happening, I thought If the roles were reversed, security would be tossing me out the door headfirst. Instead, people just laughed.

2. If you go anywhere in public with little kids, youre seen as a predator pedo.

Im a 19 y/o male, and I babysit my 3 and 6-year-old girl cousins often. Last time I babysat them, we played tag, then we had to go to the grocery store. The 3-year-old decided that she wants to play tag, and runs away from me, so I chase her down, playfully saying, I’m gonna get ya! in a funny voice cuz it gets her to laugh. A mom passes by and grabs my 3-year-old cousin, takes the 6-year-old, and goes to a manager. My aunt had to come down and tell them that I was watching them. That was the worse it’s been, but if I go anywhere in public with little kids, especially girls, I’m seen as a predator pedo.

3. If you and a girl both get drunk and have sex, only one can be accused of rape.

There was the anti-rape poster I saw a while back, where two teens get drunk and hook up. The dude gets busted for rape since she couldn’t give consent. The poster mentions nothing about it being the other way around, as in the girl getting busted for rape since he couldn’t give consent. The poster completely disregards the dude as a possible victim. It even goes as far as shaming the dude saying he ruined his life. Made me sick. All it did was promote male victims to want to hide even more.

4. Men are always the dumb ones on TV.

That men are always the dumb ones on TV. I grew up with three sisters and my mom, and I’ve always been disregarded as the stupid, out-of-touch male. Then, when I end up being right most of the time, I make a big deal about it and make everything worse, AND ITS THE TVS FAULT.

5. Women dont get blamed for dumping a man; when a man dumps a woman, hes afraid of commitment.

When a woman leaves a relationship she is praised for pursuing her needs, but when man leaves a relationship he is criticized for not being able to commit.

6. Female bisexuality is accepted. Male bisexuals? Theyre just gay.

How female bisexuality is more accepted and acknowledgedsometimes even encouragedthan male bisexuality.

7. Male genital mutilationtotally legal in every country.

Female genital mutilation: Totally illegal in most countries. Male genital mutilation: Totally legal in country.

8. If a woman gets angry at a man, its his fault.

Man gets angry at a woman, he needs to control himself. Woman gets angry at a man, man needs to learn not to make her angry.

9. Our society doesnt believe that women can sexually abuse boys.

It’s probably way too late for this to get any attention but I am a male victim of sexual abuse.

I was first sexually abused when I was four years old. It was swept under the rug because the 25-year-old that did it to me was going through some things and didn’t know any better.

Fast-forward to when I’m 9 and I was sexually abused every Friday for over a year and a half. I was told by my abuser that if I let anyone know, it would be my fault and I would get in trouble. One day I finally told, just wanting it to end even if I got in trouble. What happened? Both me (9) and my female abuser (23) were given a stern talking to. That was it. She went on to live her life. I never saw her again.

Every Friday I was locked in a room and bound. I would be left in the dark while I would have her perform oral (attempted since I was 9 and unable of getting an erection). She would pump me full of fluids and when I had to go to the bathroom she’d have me pee on her. At times she would pee into a cup and try to force me to drink it. If I was being more cooperative than usual she would untie my hands and have me touch her. At the end of every, I dunno what to call itsession?she would tell me that if I told anyone I would be taken from my parents. Even if they didn’t take me from my parents her dad who was a bad man would kill my mom and my sisters.

That is until I was 15 and made a Facebook. She found me on there and would leave comments like look who grew up sexy and stuff like that. I reached out to the adults in my life and they told me to ignore it, which I did. But they told me I was a guy and I could handle it. It’s not something that keeps me awake at night. But in order to get over it I had to harden myself because I’m a guy and guys can’t get raped.

On a previous reddit account I went to open up on a victims of sexual abuse page. I wrote out a multi-page post just getting it out there. The only replies I got were about how I was a guy and I didn’t know what it was like to be violated as a woman. I was harassed for weeks by women on there for trying to compare my experience to theirs.

10. Women can beat us up all they want, but if we hit back, were monsters.

I’m a big guy, I shave my head and grow a beard, most people think I’m intimidating.

Truly I’m timid at heart, I know how to box but have always found a way around confrontation.

I had a girlfriend that got crazy violent when she was mad, knives, tazers, guns, frequently got involved. I hit her a lot in self defense (we were together for 3 years it definitely played into my low self esteem, i loved to hate it) and it completely ruined my psyche. I think of myself as a woman beater, as a misogynist now just knowing that I’m capable of it.

Just the idea that I can hit a woman has driven me to some of my darkest depths and even now typing it I dont feel justified in my actions despite the fact I was protecting my own life.

One night she came at me with a tazer from behind she started it early and I had enough time to move, she tripped and stunned herself, screaming in pain, bruised her forehead hitting it against the floor. Neighbors heard and called the cops and she gave a false statement. Of course looking the way I do it didn’t matter what I said, I spent a night in holding before she dropped the charges and got me out. I guess I’m just thankful she “loved” me enough not to let me get charged with that shit.

It’s made me scared about new relationships because I’m afraid someone can just tell a cop whatever they want and I’ll get fucked.

Shit this will probably get buried but it was nice to say it. edit: this post blew up r.i.p. my inbox. appreciate all the support and kind words. pm me if you want to talk peeps.

11. Stay-at-home dads are lazy losers; stay-at-home moms are empowered heroes.

I’m a stay-at-home father because I’m taking care of my wife and I’s 2 year old son. My wife’s got a career that’s promising advancement and she works sometimes 12 hour days. I often get the Why doesn’t he have a job and He’s a deadbeat dad routine but if I was a woman I’m sure I’d hear about how mothers work so hard as housewives.

TLDR; Man stays home raises child = Lazy, Woman stays home raises child = Hardworking Hero.

12. If youre a male nurse, people think its because you couldnt become a doctor.

When a man is a nurse people think and many times say in their face Couldn’t become a doctor, huh?

13. If a girl sexually assaults you, youre supposed to enjoy it.

I was sexually assaulted by a girl when I was plastered once and kept saying no I don’t want this. Woke up feeling violated and insanely uncomfortable yet when I told people they all told me to suck it up and I should’ve enjoyed getting some action.

14. There are huge gender disparities in criminal sentencing.

That women who have sex with underage boys aren’t given the same sentences as men who do the same with underage girls.

15. If men show feelings, theyre seen as pussies.

I don’t like how if guys show feelings and emotions they’re some kind of pussy and if a chick does it’s normal. We are all humans and we all have the same emotions that aren’t good to bottle up.

16. Guys are still expected to be the breadwinner.

I don’t like that there’s still this idea that guys have to be the breadwinners and provide for families. Some guys are cool with being househusbands, and women are just as capable of bringing home the money.

17. If a man who murdered a woman spoke at a Mens March, itd be national news.

There was a speaker at the women’s march on Washington named Donna Hylton. She got up on stage and talked about how she had spent 25 years in prison (not mentioning why of course), and the audience cheered.

Turns out, she spent 25 years in prison because in 1985, she and a handful of other people kidnapped a 60-year-old man, tried to ransom him for $435,000, tortured him for three weeks (Hylton personally sodomized him with a metal rod), strangled him, and stuffed his body into a chest to decompose.

I can’t help but wonder how a man with an equivalent record would be received at the same event.

18. Women are allowed to reject guys based on their looks without being seen as shallow.

When I turn down chubby women I’m shallow, but I get turned down for being bald and it just her preference.

19. If a man cheats, hes an asshole; if a woman does, its the mans fault.

I hate the TV portrayal that if a man cheats its cause hes an asshole and heartless but if a women does its scandalous and its cause her husband must either treat her bad or is just never around.

20. Despite what Hillary Clinton said, men are the primary victims of war.

That men for some reason have to be soldiers in some countries while woman only .

21. Divorce laws are lopsidedly in favor of women.

Divorce law.

Women are entitled to alimony at a MUCH higher percentage, even when she’s the primary bread winner.

The idea that a divorced woman has the right to a standard of living consistent to when you were married is gross. No one is entitled to a standard of living, that’s life. That we can be divorced and I can lose my job but still have to pay to keep you living how we were when we were married and I was employed…its insane.

22. Sex toys for girlsnormal. Sex toys for guysweird loser.

When a girl buys a vibrator, its seen as a bit of naughty fun. BUT when a guy orders a 240 Volt FuckMaster Pro 5000 blowup latex doll with 6 speed pulsating vagina, elasticized anus with non-drip semen collection tray, together with optional built in realistic orgasm scream surround sound system, he’s called a pervert?

23. A guy who plays video games for hours has a problem; a woman who watches Netflix all night doesnt.

When I play 3 hours of video games I have a problem. When my wife watches 5 hours of Netflix every night its not a problem. Edit: I agree this is not a gender thing. Sorry about answering the question wrong. There is a double standard with gaming/television watching though.

24. Men are expected to just sit back and let women hit them. If they complain, theyre a pussy; if they hit back, theyre a monster.

Domestic Violence. I just got out of an abusive relationship two weeks ago and I’m shocked at how hard it was for me to talk about it and get taken seriously with my peers. She was so mean and I’m the exact opposite these days. Only today have I felt validated for everything when I happened upon a counselor on another thread. I feel terrible about myself still and apparently that’s normal. I’m 6’4″ and a professional bouncer/bodyguard but let me tell you. Men can be abused just as easily as women. It was so bad I’m spending my lunch break here and trying to find a support group. The abuse was mental and very physical. Because I’m a large man though no one would take me seriously. It was always my fault, always me to blame. The preconceived general thought is that men are tough and can handle it. If not then I’m made to feel emasculated and told I’m a pussy. The truth is I just don’t believe in harming people I care about. I’m ranting now because I still can’t really talk about it to anyone. It’s a sad and shitty double standard. No one should have to deal with abuse.

25. Part of being a man is being disposable and no one giving a fuck if your life ends up ruined.

That part of being a man is being disposable and no one giving a fuck if your life ends up ruined.

We hear talk all the time about the gender earnings gap, women’s right to bodily autonomy (via abortions and access to birth control), and other women’s issues, and those are all important things to discuss.

What we don’t hear as often is the fact that 84% of the homeless are men, 92% of workplace fatalities happen to men, 91% of people in prison are men, etc.

We talk about the subtle forms of discrimination in society that result in women choosing to pursue careers which don’t compensate them financially the same way that careers popular with men dobut we never talk about the subtle forms of discrimination that cause men to at a rate nearly an order of magnitude higher than women.

26. When a woman is raped its a tragedy; when a man is raped its a joke.

When a woman is raped its a tragedy; when a man is raped its a joke. When a woman falsely reports a rape, it ruins the man’s life, she gets off scot-free or a tiny jail term.

27. Men who take selfies are much more likely to be accused of narcissism.

I have to say that the standard of what is acceptable on social media. If a female Instagram profile is full of 400 attractive selfies, people are not as critical of the narcissistic side of the pictures as much as they would if it were a guy. Not that I would want to post 400 selfies, but constantly posting pictures of yourself in specific poses isn’t a form of modeling or self-love as much as it is an expression of narcissism.

28. Theres no demand for plus size male models.

How we apparently need plus sized models to represent all women’s body types, but the thought of having male models with beer bellies and no rippling muscles/6 packs is disgusting.

29. Women get shorter sentences for the same crimes as men.

Women who can’t pay child support go to special homes. Men who can’t pay child support go to prison.

Women get shorter sentences for the same crimes as men, such as murder, rape, theft, or simple misdemeanors. Sometimes they aren’t punished at all

If a drunk male and a drunk female have sex, the female could charge for rape since she could not consent even though both parties voluntarily intoxicated themselves. This isn’t a common problem but it happens more than it needs to

Female requirements for the military, police, and fire responders are easier. During basic training in the army I saw a dude carrying 2 rucksacks (google it) and a girl walking behind him with nothing on her back.

Male rape victims are ignored or taken less seriously

Sexual harassment in the workspace happens to men and to women, men are just less likely to report it since they’re taken less seriously.

There are female quotas for CEO jobs, which inadvertently puts more qualified men out of a job in the name of gender equality.

Men pay higher auto premiums.

Women in divorce courts are more likely to win custody.

Men who want to teach young children are weird creepy pedophiles.

30. Its not OK to think a girl is too fat, but its OK for her to think guys are too short.

Its not OK to think a girl is too fat, but its OK for her to think guys are too short.

31. If a guy cries or shows any emotion whatsoever, he’s weak or not masculine.

That if a guy cries or shows any emotion whatsoever, he’s weak or not masculine. Fuck that. Guys are humans, not robots. They should be as expressive with their feelings as they want with whoever they want. I’d argue that trying to repress your own vulnerabilities is the real weakness.

32. Women who make rape accusations are automatically believed, even if theyre lying.

I fucking hate it that a woman can accuse a man of rape, and everyone’s on her side without a doubt, even if she’s lying. Flip it around, and the first thing the guy gets thrown in his face is probably something like You’re supposed to enjoy it, or You let a woman take control of you? That’s more scarring to the man than it is to the womanat least people take the woman’s word for it.

33. On a sinking ship, its women and children first.

The biggest double standard to me is ‘saving the women and children first.’ Why does a man’s life suddenly have less value in these sorts of situations?

34. Pro-choice? Men have absolutely no choice in the matter.

If an unmarried couple becomes pregnant the woman has 100% of the choice to keep the baby or have an abortion. If the man wants the baby and the woman doesn’t the man is out of luck. If the man doesn’t want the baby and the woman does the man is on the hook for 18 years of child support. Controversial I know, but I’d like to hear thoughts.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/07/16/34-men-discuss-societys-insane-double-standards-that-favor-women-and-hurt-men/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/163070503847

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