#of supposed to be above politics but now he's elected by everyone and the metaphor that people use often is he was supposed to be a

[maddy-ferguson]

i love that the last people heard the leftist coalition won the french legislative elections so they think we have a leftist government now lol

[opedguy]

Presidential Historian Turned Political Hack

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), Dec. 31, 2020.--Giving some blinding insights into presidential history, 65-year-old Presidential historian Michael Beschloss gave away all the trade secrets, denouncing 74-year-old President Donald Trump to 41-year-old MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, part of the network’s anti-Trump lineup.  Beschloss told Hayes that Trump could do nothing to change the record of coronavirus AKA CoV-2 or Covid-19 cases and deaths in the United States.  Beschloss sounded no different than 78-year-old former Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward who became an integral part of the 2020 Democrat campaign strategy to blame Trump for the Covid-19 crisis.  Woodward asserted in his book, “Rage,” that Trump knew everything about virus Jan. 28, when Trump told Woodward in an interview he didn’t want to panic the public, when there were only a handful of cases and no deaths in the United States.

             Yet Woodward took his interview with Trump completely out-of-context, telling the Democrat Party and all that would listen that Trump didn’t act responsibly to stop the budding public health emergency.  Woodward and now Beschlos are so full of hot air, so partisan, so twisted in their thinking that they must be exposed.  Woodward was not a journalist interviewing Trump last January but a Democrat political operative setting the attention-publicity-seeking president up for a fall.  CNN and MSNBC ran with Woodward’s false narrative, doing everything possible to sabotage Trump’s 2020 campaign:  Guess what, it worked.  Now Beschloss reveals for all to see, presidential history is no different than the kind of tabloid, hyper-partisan reporting seeing in today’s age of corrupt journalism.  Beschloss let everyone see that there is nothing venerable or sacrosanct about presidential history.      

       Beschloss writing history guarantees that the presidential record on Trump reflects the writer’s extreme prejudice, not a factual account of the record.  “Donald Trump is not going to change the record.  He was largely responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans who did not need to die,” Beschloss told the Trump-hating MSNBC journalist Chris Hayes.  Where does Beschloss get his epidemiological facts about the 2020 Covid-19 global pandemic?  “Millions of others who suffered from covid did not need suffer.  This is really Nero’s fiddling while Rome burns,” Beschloss told Hayes, using an old worn-out metaphor.  Before Beschloss’s time, no presidential historian blamed the 1918 Spanish flue global pandemic on President Woodrow Wilson.  But, no, Beschloss can’t contain his own hatred toward Trump preaching to the choir on the deeply anti-Trump MSNBC.       

      Can you imagine the coronavirus pandemic originated in China in October, November and December 2019, suppressed by the Chinese Communist Government for months until the World Health Organization [WHO] finally declared a global pandemic March 11.  But Woodward and now Beschloss pins all 20,386,101 cases and 353,226 deaths on Trump, defying the wildest, most irresponsible reporting about the global Covid-19 crisis in the United States.  If that’s how Beschloss writes history, it’s no wonder that he’s sunk his profession to new lows.  So, in Beschloss’s mind, Trump was supposed to wave a magic wand to stop the Chinese government from sending millions of happy Covid-19 infected tourists all over the planet last year.  Trump placed a ban on Chinese flights to the U.S. on Jan. 31, prompting President-elect Joe Biden and other Democrats to call Trump xenophobic.     

        If Beschloss wants to write about history, he should report on WHO’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom who held a press conference Feb. 5 to slam Trump for interfering with China’s commercial affairs.  Trump criticized Tedros for being “China centric,” because he held Chinese president Xi Jinping’s dirty secret about the runaway Covid-19 crisis in Wuhan, China.  Tedros waited three months before declaring a global pandemic March 11. But if you listen to Woodward and Beschloss, it was all Trump’s fault for spreading the virus in the United States.  Trump commissioned 80-year-old ��National Institute’s of Health [NIH] Chief of Allergy and Infectious Disease Dr. Anthony Fauci to head up his coronavirus task force.  Fauci, who initially said it was unnecessary to wear masks, said on repeated occasions that Trump did everything asked of him to deal with the rapidly spreading Covid-19 crisis.     

        Beschloss, like Woodward, have their own partisan narrative that suits their political leanings, not reporting on the real facts.  Beschloss, who acts above the fray when it comes to partisan politics, exposed for all to see the extreme bias in his presidential history writing.  “Donald Trump is a kind of person we have never ever seen before in the presidency, and I hope we never ever see again,” Beschloss said.  “When you’ve go a president who has no empathy, who has no compassion, you see a spectacle like what we’ve seen this week,” Beschloss told Hayes, referring to Trump reluctance to sign the $900 billion stimulus bill.  Beschloss has expose for all to see the total lack of objectivity and factual reporting in his presidential history.  No matter how much presidential historians despise Trump, or any other president, they have a sacred covenant to the truth, not their own biases.

 About the Author 

 John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.               

[hotelconcierge]

YOUNG ADULT FICTIONS

Slate Star Codex, “Some groups of people who may not 100% deserve our eternal scorn,” defending Harry Potter political analogies:

Comparing politics to your favorite legends is as old as politics and legends. Herodotus used an extended metaphor between the Persian invasions of his own time and the Trojan War. When King Edward IV took the English throne in 1461, all anybody could talk about was how it reminded them of King Arthur. John Dryden’s famous poem Absalom and Achitophel is a bizarrely complicated analogy of 17th-century English politics to an obscure Biblical story. Throughout American history people have compared King George to Pharaoh, Benedict Arnold to Judas, Abraham Lincoln to Moses, et cetera.

Well, how many people know who Achitophel is these days? Even Achilles is kind of pushing it. So we stick to what we know – and more important, what we expect everyone else will know too. And so we get Harry Potter.

“But a children’s book?” Look, guys, fantasy is what the masses actually like. They liked it in Classical Greece, where they had stories like Bellerophon riding a flying horse and fighting the Chimera. They liked it in medieval Britain, where they would talk about the Knights of the Round Table slaying dragons as they searched for the Holy Grail. The cultural norm where only kids are allowed to read fantasy guilt-free and everybody else has to read James Joyce is a weird blip in the literary record which is already being corrected. Besides, James Joyce makes for a much less interesting source of political metaphors (“The 2016 election was a lot like Finnegan’s Wake: I have no idea what just happened”)

Hoo boy did he walk into that one.

Plebeians have been plebeian forever, granted, although the age of SSC’s examples (Medieval Britain?) is telling: contra the above, the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow literature exists whenever the majority of the population is literate.

But regardless, SSC (for the record, mostly Good) is being fooled by branding. No one compares the “fantasy” elements of Harry Potter to the U.S. political system. The fantasy elements are irrelevant, which is why Hamilton works just as well. Wannabe pundits compare the characters. And it is the characters, their psyches, the ambiguity that persists after two millennia of debate, that has made The Iliad stand the test of time. As clever as Artemis Fowl may be, it’s naive to pretend there’s no difference.

What makes it obvious that Deadpool (rating: R) is a kid’s movie while 2001: A Space Odyssey (rating: G) is not? Turn on the TV and flip through a few kids shows—nothing educational, I’m talking epilepsy triggers. After a couple, you’ll notice a unifying theme: everything is turned up to the max. All the characters are live/laugh/loving, fighting, crying; the soundtrack goes major or minor for every ephemeral mood. The characters have saucer eyes and exaggerated movements, The Emoji Movie being the logical conclusion of the genre, every motivation gets a musical number, these shows are MAXIMALLY EXPRESSIVE, leaving no doubt as to what emotion you are supposed to feel by the microsecond.

Please hear that I mean no disrespect when I say that this is why people with autism like Disney.

Q: Why did it feel good to watch [Disney movies] over and over again, that you kept wanting to? Watch them over and over again? How did that feel to you?

A: It felt comforting.

Q: Comforting.

A: It felt comforting.

Q: Why?

A: Because it would help me with...reducing my autism. (Radiolab)

Nothing wrong with that. Partisan bullshit aside, Harry Potter is great. But it’s important to recognize the limitations. Young adult fiction can have complex characters, worldbuilding, and rules of magic/ethics/rationality as long as the complexity is spelled out for you. “Snape was mean to Harry...but [flashback] that’s because, deep down, he was still in love with Lily...” What such stories will never ask you to do is intuit that Snape had tribulations, they assume that you have no instinct for cognitive empathy, which you don’t, which is why your politics are vapid. 

(When fiction deprives you of access to any character’s mind or explanation of events, you feel the opposite of comfort: horror. Saw is not a scary film because it is nothing but explanations; a Kafka story feels “off” even before shit goes down because the world and the characters refuse to show their work.)

Young adult fiction is a stepping stone, good if it helps you get better at understanding people without a Wes Anderson narrator whispering in your ear. Unfortunately, the ability to parrot accepted opinions is often taken for the ability to derive judgments of one’s own. I’m thinking of a homestuck 13 year old who is constantly told that he/she is “so mature” for getting straight A’s and being well-spoken with the dinner guests and not ditching class to smoke brick weed with Devin. Whether or not those behaviors are good, the kid isn’t mature, he or she is well-trained, and if you keep claiming maturity then you are going to stunt development. Sorry: not having an adolescent rebellion means you didn’t complete adolescence. The result is neotenous adults who are not overly sensitive—as conservative media would claim—but rather overly dependent on external rules. Cards Against Humanity is so funny, right? You get to say bad words, but it’s only a game.

“Help, I was a gifted kid and now I’m a normal adult!” Different adjective, same problem. Once Hal Incandenza is typecast as “gifted,” everyone will find it convenient to grade him (praise/no praise) on whether he is living up to his label. How do you look gifted? You can solve P vs. NP......or you can read the dictionary. I’ll bet that every ex-gifted kid who now uses “adulting” as a verb is a fan of those faux-pretentious memes, “mfw she confuses epistemics and ontology,” fitting Wikipedia philosophy into preformed joke structures, lowbrow expressions of highbrow concepts, a few college words to suggest immeasurable depths. You do what you know: exert the minimum necessary effort to convince other people of your intelligence. But you can’t convince yourself.

The consequences are predictable. Imposter syndrome. Scrupulosity. Sexual fetishes suffixed with -play. Gushing compassion ruined by the inability to picture how one appears to the outside world. Neediness. Ill-fitting jeans. Trouble with romance, and not because they don’t know how—deep down they do—but because they cling to a rulebook (“milady”) instead of trusting instinct. They were never allowed to have instincts. For that matter they’ve never really wanted, never felt a desire that wasn’t assigned, which is why: open relationships, switched majors, medicated anxiety, and ambivalence, ambivalence, ambivalence.

I know how heavy lies the burden of wasted potential. So please take this in the gentlest possible way: you were never that great. Greatness is a meaningless thing to apply to a kid, or a college student, or any idea that hasn’t forced it’s way onto paper. The only path is forward. “It’s our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” I think that’s Dumbledore, take it or leave it—there’s a time and a place for young adult fiction.

Coming soon:

THE FALSE POSITIVES

THE FALSE NEGATIVES

[treatsandtruths]

Pop Culture - LOVER

I am, have, and forever will be a huge @taylorswift fan for many reasons. Initially, her music drew me in: the way she could take one singular detail of her life and make it feel so universal. She is undeniably one of the most talented individuals in the music industry. She is the boss, she makes her own decisions and more recently she is unapologetically using her voice to speak up for equality for ALL (sign the equality act here: https://www.change.org/p/support-the-equality-act?use_react=false )

Here is a track-by-track breakdown of her most recent album Lover which was released exactly one month ago today:

1. I Forgot That You Existed

Favorite Line: “And I thought that it would kill me, but it didn’t”

Fan Theory: it is about Calvin Harris

Evidence: "Would’ve been right there front row // Even if nobody came to your show”

Taylor Insight: "This song closes the book on ‘reputation’ in resolving that whole conflict with a shrug,”

2. Cruel Summer

Favorite Line: “Said “I’m fine”, but it wasn’t true // I don’t wanna keep secrets just to keep you”

Taylor Insight: “My favorite line from this song is ‘I love you. Ain’t that the worst thing you ever heard?’”

Fun Fact: Demi Lovato posted this song on her Instagram story, calling it “A jam” and saying that “Life’s too short for women to not support other women.. especially when women release great music”

3. Lover

Favorite Line: “And I’m highly suspicious that everyone who sees you wants you”

Fan Insight: A fan who attended one of Taylor’s infamous secret sessions claims this is Taylor’s all time favorite song she has written

Taylor Insight: “This has to be one of my favorite bridges, I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.”

4. The Man

Favorite Line: “What I was wearing, if I was rude // Could all be separated from my good ideas and power moves”

Taylor Insight: “A man does something, it’s ‘strategic’; a women does the same thing, it’s ‘calculated’. A man is allowed to ‘react’; a woman can only ‘over-react.’”

5. The Archer

Favorite Line: “And all of my heroes die all alone // Help me hold onto you”

Fun Fact: The Archer is track 5 on the Lover , joining the trend of having particularly emotional songs be track 5 including Cold as You, White Horse, Dear John, All Too Well, All You Had To Do Was Stay and Delicate

6. I Think He Knows

Favorite Line: “I am an architect // I'm drawing up the plans”

Taylor Easter Egg: Taylor placed a sign in her YNTCD video for 16th avenue as an easter egg for this song; she references the street multiple times in the line “He got my heartbeat // skipping down 16th avenue”

7. Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince

Favorite Line: “Running through rose thorns // I saw the scoreboard // And ran for my life”

Taylor Insight: “I wrote it a couple of months after midterm elections, and I wanted to take the idea of politics and pick a metaphorical place for that to exist. And so I was thinking about a traditional American high school, where there’s all these kinds of social events that could make someone feel completely alienated.”

Fun Fact: Halsey tweeted, “It’s me. I’m the heartbreak prince.”

8. Paper Rings

Favorite Line: “Went home and tried to stalk you on the internet // Now I've read all of the books beside your bed”

Rumor Mill : Many outlets and fans have speculated that Taylor and Joe are close to an engagement, a marriage or are already married: an idea that this song plays off of

Taylor Insight: “This song talks about true love and if you really find true love, you probably don’t care what the symbolism of that love is.”

9. Cornelia Street

Favorite Line:  “Barefoot in the kitchen // Sacred new beginnings // That became my religion, listen”

Fun Fact: Cornelia Street is a small street in the West Village of Manhattan where Taylor rented an apartment for a summer when she fell in love with Joe Alwyn

10. Death By A Thousand Cuts

Favorite Line: “I ask the traffic lights if it'll be alright // They say, "I don't know"

Taylor Insight: regarding the above line, “When you’re struggling through something time slows down and everything is a sign and you’ll take advice from a tree because you’re just GOIN THROUGH IT MAN.”

Fun Fact: The movie Someone Great on Netflix inspired Taylor to write this song

11. London Boy

Favorite Line: “I love my hometown as much as Motown, I love SoCal // And you know I love Springsteen, faded blue jeans, Tennessee whiskey”

Fun Fact: Taylor performed an acoustic version of the song live for BBC Radio

Taylor Insight: fans initially criticized the song for being unrealistic, as they did not believe one could visit all these London landmarks in one afternoon, Taylor addressed this idea : “Somebody told me, ‘They think that you’re talking about one day,’ and I was like, ‘Oh  no, you’d never make it. You wouldn’t make it. You’d make it in three years!’”

12. Soon You’ll Get Better

Favorite Line: “And I hate to make this all about me // But who am I supposed to talk to? // What am I supposed to do // If there's no you?”

Taylor Insight: “It’s just not something that we deal with until we have to, until we see it, until we experience it, until someone close to us is going through something like that. And so, writing about it was really emotional. And I’m just gonna stop talking about it now.”

Fun Fact: This track features the Dixie Chicks in the chorus!

13. False God

Favorite Line: “They all warned us about times like this // They say the road gets hard and you get lost // When you're led by blind faith”

Fun Fact: James Bay covered this song, to Taylor’s approval. She reposted the cover and wrote, “This is STUNNING. THE TALENT”

14. You Need To Calm Down

Winner of Video of the Year at the 2019 MTV Video Music Awards

Favorite Line: “And we see you over there on the internet // Comparing all the girls who are killing it // But we figured you out // We all know now we all got crowns”

Fun Fact: When asked in a CBS interview when she will stop singing to the haters, Taylor responded, "Well, when they stop coming for me, I will stop singing to them,"

Taylor Insight: “With all of the trolling, cancel culture, telling people how to live their lives, or pitting women against each other... you’re being too loud.”

15. Afterglow

Favorite Line: “Hey // It’s all me in my head”

Fun Fact: Camila Cabello storied this song on Instagram, calling it her favorite one from Taylor’s new album

16. ME!

Favorite Line: “I know I tend to make it about me”

Fun Fact: This initial single from the album was announced with a mural in Nashville of butterfly wings, where Taylor made an appearance the day before the song’s release

Taylor Insight: “We literally were like, OK, let’s say ‘Hey, kids! Spelling is fun’ because we want everyone to know that this song is not really serious because it’s not, like, a serious love song”, Taylor later removed this line from the song when the entire album was released

17. It’s Nice To Have A Friend

Favorite Line: “You've been stressed out lately? Yeah, me too”

Fun Fact: The Regent Park School of Music in Toronto is sampled on the song and the proceeds from the song are being donated to their music program

18. Daylight

Favorite Line: “Maybe I've stormed out of every single room in this town”

Taylor Insight : “I was kind of in my head referring to the album as Daylight for a while. But Lover, to me, was a more interesting title, more of an accurate theme in my head, and more elastic as a concept.”