This has been all over Twitter today. It’s for those of us who don’t know anything about CUPS in dogs.
I spent a good part of the afternoon at the New Mexico History Museum’s new exhibit on the 1960s counterculture in New Mexico. It was so-so.
But this does look like something out of an acid trip.
John Revolta
How bout: First!!
NobodySpecial
The stars are right.
Mnemosyne
I’m still wondering why Cheech Marin is there (the guy on the left) pretending to be a Saudi official. Has he been working for the CIA this whole time and now his cover has accidentally been blown?
G is watching “Twin Peaks” in the living room while I cough in the other room. So. tired. of. this. flu.
dmsilev
Saruman and Woirmtongue look deeply into the Palantir.
Redshift
Oliver Willis (@owillis) has been all over this all evening.
Doug R
Touch it at the right angle and it makes your pecker buzz, believe me.
amk
I liked this one.
amk
@Mnemosyne: he is the egyptian twitler.
Adam L Silverman
The Nazgul use a palantir to communicate with Sauron.
Redshift
And the Church of Satan had the best response:
https://twitter.com/ChurchofSatan/status/866453928535236608
Adam L Silverman
Looks like they found the Loc-Nar.
RepubAnon
Hail, hail fire and snow
Call the angel – we must go.
Far away, far to see.
Friendly angel – come to me!
jerri
I just want to hear Jerry Farwell defend/explain just what Trump doing.
SiubhanDuinne
I hate to be dense, but seriously, what the hell is going on in that picture?
I’ve been otherwise occupied most of the day and have no idea what this is. All I’ve seen are a few amusing captions, but nothing that really explains it.
dmsilev
I’m not up on my DC Comics minutia; was there ever a White Lantern Corps, deriving power from large amounts of illicit money?
Mike J
I’ll make the same comment I make for everything Trump does: Imagine if this were Obama or Hillary.
Mnemosyne
The headline for this story at the BBC is ridiculously click-baity, but it turned out to be a really interesting tale of a woman who disguised herself as a man to become a tanzanite miner and struck it rich.
Adam L Silverman
@SiubhanDuinne: It’s actually was the on switch for the power supply for Saudi’s new counterterrorism center. They built it like this so they could do this sort of ceremony for a photo op. Now the President gets to tell everyone he helped get the Saudis focused on countering terrorism.
Exurban Mom
I shall call him Squishy and he shall be mine and he shall be my Squishy Come on, Squishy Come on, little Squishy…
Mnemosyne
@amk:
Seriously, though, dude looks like Cheech Marin, and it’s not just the cold medicine talking. Look at the version of the photo that you linked to.
hellslittlestangel
The latest failed Green Lantern reboot.
Lizzy L
@Adam L Silverman: Saruman possessed the Orthanc stone, which Sauron used to ensnare him. Denethor had one and was corrupted through its use. One stone looked only west, into the land beyond the sunset. The other palantir were lost. The Nazgul had no need of one, being wraiths.
But seriously, WTF? Can anyone imagine Barack Obama in this picture?
SiubhanDuinne
@Adam L Silverman:
Huh. Okay, thanks. It looks ridiculous.
Adam L Silverman
@dmsilev: There was a White Lantern, but it had nothing to do with illicit money.
http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/White_Lantern_Corps_(New_Earth)
Origuy
@dmsilev: There was the Sinestro Corp, founded by Green Lanterns’ archenemy. Their oath was:
“In blackest day, in brightest night,
Beware your fears made into light.
Let those who try to stop what’s right
Burn like my power Sinestro’s might!”
But I found out one that’s even more appropriate, the Oath of the Orange Lantern Corps, which was fueled by avarice.
“What’s mine is mine and mine and mine.
And mine and mine and mine!
Not yours!”
Adam L Silverman
@SiubhanDuinne:
Manyakitty
@Adam L Silverman: I’m seeing Heavy Metal references EVERYWHERE lately!
lgerard
The Saudi guy looks really sheepish…like he can’t believe he is actually doing this
Adam L Silverman
@Lizzy L: I’m aware of the source material.
NotMax
Worst H. P. Lovecraft movie ever.
Adam L Silverman
@Manyakitty: They’ve been showing the original and 2000 on El Rey in heavy, if I may use that term, rotation this month.
GxB
@Redshift: Further down that twit thread “GlowBallism”
Very nice.
Mike J
Thanks, Obama
https://twitter.com/DailyTrix/status/866470023023472640
piratedan
@Adam L Silverman: Does that mean that HRC is the last descendant of the line of Taarna?
Adam L Silverman
dmsilev
@Origuy:
Would explain the hair I guess.
NotMax
Caption?
“The one I’ve got at Mar-a-lago is bigger. Believe me.”
Manyakitty
@Adam L Silverman: I grew up on midnight movies with the original and usually The Wall or The Song Remains the Same. Good times.
Peale
Adenoid Hynkel could not be reached for comment.
amk
my caption
gawd, what a buncha of oldies determined to bring havoc to the world. diaf..
Adam L Silverman
If anyone is wondering, now that CNN’s Jim Acosta has reported that one of the President’s senior aides have reported he’s exhausted one day into his trip, here’s Secretary Clinton’s travel schedule.
https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/travels/secretary/clinton-hillary-rodham
This is just through April 2009, much more at the link.
Aleta
Renewable energy hoax.
However:
-from Indy100 dot com
Adam L Silverman
@dmsilev: Larfleeze:
http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Orange_Lantern_Corps_(New_Earth)
NotMax
@NotMax
Alternate caption:
“Okay, okay. I’ll touch your balls if you touch mine.”
SiubhanDuinne
@Adam L Silverman:
Trump is going to have very high expectations for turning on the National Christmas Tree lights.
mai naem mobile
‘See that’s how big my inauguration crowd was’
‘Oh,Abu Iva…Mr.President,that’s a yuuuge crowd. So we get the good dill on the superduper sekret weapons correct?’
‘Yes, we just sent the $100M donation to Ivanka’s(wink,wink)’Charity’
amk
@Aleta: I remember during the putin’s we are all georgians and I looked into soul war germans and europeans freaked out how putin will choke off their oil supply during winter months. Guess they got smart about it.
romeo24
Obviously communicating with Peter Thiel…
NotMax
@Adam L. Silverman
They’ve rechristened the Heritage Foundation?
;)
Aleta
Supposedly Trump cancelled giving a speech and Ivanka presented it. (Though it looks like she’d prepared to do it beforehand, because she had visuals projected behind her, which doesn’t seem like his thang. Unless it’s slides of property with his name underneath.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
“Moments later, the three men became 200-foot kaiju and proceeded to lay fiery waste to Tehran.”
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: I have no idea.
amk
@Adam L Silverman: So, the saudis will nuke themselves then?
Adam L Silverman
@Aleta: If that was the women’s empowerment speech, the women were not allowed to attend.
NotMax
Alternate alternate caption:
“So we’re agreed then? The one who keeps his hand on it the longest gets the oil fields.”
Aleta
“O … wa … ta …si … lee … goo … siam … O wa .. ta si … lee goo … siam …. O wa ta si lee goo siam.”
amk
#maga
amk
Adam L Silverman
@amk: When I wrote a report for a 2 star on the Army staff on ISIL and its doctrine/ideology back in 2010, I included this quote:
Muwaheedun are adherents to Abdul Wahhab’s doctrine of the radical unity of the Deity (tawheed). It literally translates as unitarians, but that would be confusing, so…
Frankensteinbeck
Trump is the only person who looks comfortable with that kind of jackass purple drama. It’s interesting that he’s doing (relatively) well in Saudi Arabia, but it’s also an excellent reminder that Trump is able to keep focus and willpower for one purpose: Lining his own pockets.
@Adam L Silverman:
I set one of my supervillain books in 1980, and felt obligated to create a heroine with a glowing sword in a ridiculously exposing costume just because if you don’t include the Heavy Metal aesthetic somewhere, you haven’t represented the period. It’s a side detail, sure, but it has to be there. It was definitely part of the zeitgeist.
sukabi
@Adam L Silverman: give it another couple of weeks and even Jones will find his fortune lies in turning on Drumpf.
Joe Falco
My caption would just be all the lyrics to the AC DC song “Big Balls”
Aleta
@Adam L Silverman: This one was the Tweeps social media conference. It doesn’t quite make sense that he was going to give such a talk, so maybe the plan was he would just appear. Anyway, I looked for a reference and found one at the Palmer report, fwiw.
NotMax
@Adam L. Silverman
The coin of history has two sides – The Sauds and Wahhab created and expanded Diriyah on one side of the world (roughly) the same time we created America.
Frankensteinbeck
@sukabi:
I think it’s going to take a lot longer than that. Conservatives feel desperate. In the face of a world where a black man became a two-term president, it will take an enormous amount of humiliation and failure to make them abandon the champion of the white race. I predict he’ll get a bump back to inauguration-level approval from this Saudi trip, then start sliding again, and it will keep going like that but getting just a little worse each time. It takes only a tiny amount of reassurance to make someone that desperate cling to hope again.
Aleta
@amk:
Adam L Silverman
@Frankensteinbeck: I’ll make a note in your dossier.
amk
@Aleta: In a way, I am amused that the twitler is yanking the msm chain. At least now, they will do sorta journalism? …Nah.
NotMax
@Aleta
TASS and Sputnik will keep us apprised.
;)
Frankensteinbeck
@Adam L Silverman:
Ha!
Adam L Silverman
@Aleta: I have a copy of the Israel itinerary from Haaretz. I’ll be doing a post on the Israel leg of the trip late morning tomorrow. And why the cancellations and changes he’s demanded are tremendously offensive to Israelis.
I’m not sure he’s going to make it past Israel. If he’s already exhausted, and they’re cancelling even more events in Israel already, then he’s going to be a complete wreck by Tuesday. If Israelis and/or Palestinians decide to protest him while he’s there, it’ll get even worse.
sukabi
@Frankensteinbeck: think there’s too many dropping shoes for much of a bounce and unless his aids shoot him up with haldol and thorazine and put him in a straight jacket he’ll keep talking and twitting.
Frankensteinbeck
@Adam L Silverman:
Yeah, that struck me, too. I chalk it up to ‘All Trump gave a damn about on this trip was securing some deal that he personally profits from with the Saudis.’ Nobody else is paying him, so he’s going to treat them like shit. I expect the foreign trip to go downhill, fast.
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: Yep.
Adam L Silverman
@Frankensteinbeck:
http://www.mediaite.com/online/trumps-cult-was-designed-to-withstand-this-current-media-onslaught-and-thats-whats-happening/
NotMax
@Adam L. Silverman
Shorter Bannon:
“You don’t vant to gett too chummy mit der jooze, mein F- – Mr. President.”
Adam L Silverman
@Frankensteinbeck: I’m pretty sure the Pope politely asking him to care for the poor will set him off. Especially if he’s physically and mentally worn out from the trip so far.
I also expect the Pope to make Bannon wait on the plane. Bannon got himself up to his eyeballs in this bizarre plot by one of these semi-martial Catholic orders against the Pope when he was running Breitbart.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/world/europe/vatican-steve-bannon-pope-francis.html?_r=2
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: I think it is a combination of his staff trying to protect him from the trip: limit time in the sun, limit time in the outdoors because of the heat in the Middle East, limit his physical exertion. This explains the ongoing changes to the arrival ceremony at Ben-Gurion.
Limit his ability to say something insensitive and stupid. This combined with the above explains turning the Yad Vashem tour into a 15 photo op.
Lizzy L
@Aleta:
@Adam L Silverman:
I have a certain amount (a very small amount) of sympathy for the man. He is 70 years old, and absolutely unaccustomed to this sort of schedule, or indeed, to work at this level. He has no experience in this world. He hates travel. Whatever he thought the job was, it isn’t. Whatever his expectations were, they were wrong.
Somewhere and when, there’s a alternate universe in which Hillary Clinton is President of the US.
Raoul
@Adam L Silverman: So is this a fleet of Saudi citizens working as anti-extremism twitter trolls?
amk
@Adam L Silverman:
LMAO.
Frankensteinbeck
@Adam L Silverman:
There is a lot of truth in that article, but like most journalism – even on the liberal side – it refuses to discuss the elephant in the room. Trump did not make this cult. It was a cult looking for a leader, and he fit the specifications they wanted. Conservatives were blindly ignoring facts they didn’t want to hear long before Trump showed up. It’s been a growing process of decades, stemming from racists having to stick their fingers in their ears and chant “LA LA LA” steadily louder to shut out that white Christian men will not rule forever. FOX and right wing radio were built out of this need, and keep it fed so it can grow faster.
EDIT – @Adam L Silverman:
Yeah, I’ve been looking forward to Trump meeting Francis. It will be the true test of how many fucks Francis has left to give.
Adam L Silverman
@Lizzy L: No arguments here. He’s a self deluding, declasse (or as our new Russian friends say nekulturny) moron who has survived this long on inherited wealth, privilege, and attorneys. This will not end well.
If he actually meant well and was an amicable buffoon, I’d have some empathy/sympathy. But he doesn’t and he isn’t. I’m reserving my empathy and sympathy for his victims.
Another Scott
@Adam L Silverman: I think that’s a more disturbing picture than the orb, myself.
It looks like some sort of lecture hall for college students. How on Earth is serious work supposed to be done there?
Cheers,
Scott.
GregB
Trump World Order: Grab ‘Em By The Planet.
NotMax
@Adam L. Silverman
Snark meter off at the shop for tuning?
“I don’t give a goddam, I want a BLT and I want it now!”
Adam L Silverman
@Raoul: I have no idea. I’m sure that’s part of it, but I haven’t dug into what that center is supposed to do.
Aleta
-ABC
Adam L Silverman
@Frankensteinbeck: No argument here. It is the piece that is all too often neglected and/or ignored in the reporting on this: that this has been building/being built for over 40 years. The President simply walked right in and stole it out from under its creators. If we’re lucky the monster will only eat him and them.
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: If you know where to go you can find pork in Israel.
Aleta
GregB
@Aleta:
Tillerson isn’t the US Secretery of State, he’s the global oil cartel’s Secretery of Quaker State.
He is playing the part of Ned Beatty in Network.
qwerty43
Jon Chait on the orb …
Raoul
@Frankensteinbeck: Yup. Decades of claiming that tax cuts pay for themselves is all you really need to know about this cult. Sprinkle in insane levels of climate disruption denialism, and you have a doomsday cult.
Trump is the apex of their aims. And so far we don’t have enough people able to see that, though I think it is growing a bit.
Aleta
Frankensteinbeck
@Raoul:
My feeling is that they are not going to change. The stakes are too high, for them. What we have to hope and work for is getting everyone else as motivated as they are. Maybe that’s happening. The recent protests have no modern precedent, and the special elections have been brutal for the GOP. We’ll see.
Raoul
@Adam L Silverman: As Another Scott suggests, it looks to me like a giant room full of study carrels in rows, with terminals. So my first thought was humans acting similarly to Russian trolls, but to oppose extremist ideology in Arab and/or Islamic social and chat sites.
Truly spitballing that, tho.
Aleta
scav
“Mirror Mirror in the ball,
Who’s the yuugest of them all?”
(with a dash of The Judgement of Paris thrown in for good measure.)
Aleta
@scav: I like this one.
Doug R
I keep thinking it looks like This
http/theoaklandjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/simpsons_nsa_caught.jpg
Mary G
Aleta
I wonder who staged this, told everyone where to stand. Was the PM of Malaysia supposed to get his hands on the ball too but Tr took up too much room, so he’s left standing politely to the side?
NotMax
@Aleta
No pictures of the undoubted scene of Dolt 45 furiously using hand wipes after the shutter clicked.
Aleta
If I were a New World Order kind of guy I’d be disappearing into my bunker now, or loading supplies into my homemade tank or whatever the plan is.
TenguPhule
Receiving orders from the Mothership.
Trump: Kill all Humans!
Saudi: Anal Probe the Cows.
TenguPhule
@dmsilev: White lantern is the power of life.
Steeplejack
@Doug R:
Link fixed.
Elizabelle
Caption: The Garden of Petro Delights
after Hieronymous Bosch
Aleta
-cnn
Morzer
“Witchking to Nazgul, are you receiving me?”
TenguPhule
@Adam L Silverman:
Which guarantees that Trump is going to ask for some where it isn’t available.
TenguPhule
Omen IV: “This time, its for real”
Dr. Ronnie James, D.O.
“Just the tip, humankind. Just the tip.”
Viva Brisvegas
“Are you sure my hands are supposed to go all the way around this orb? Guys? Oh, you guys … stop laughing.”
Aleta
“O spirit, keeper of the gate to the other realm, we summon you, we ask of you: Is Wilson there? Can we talk to Wilson?”
Amir Khalid
@Aleta:
Huh? That guy at Trump’s side doesn’t look anything like Najib. He’s way too short (Najib is almost as tall as Trump), has regular-length grey hair rather Najib’s close-cropped salt-and-pepper, and is wearing glasses.
Aleta
@Amir Khalid:
These pictures seem to match, even the suit and tie:
http://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2017/05/21/najib-trump-muslim-leader-saudi-summit/
https://mobile.twitter.com/nktpnd/status/866508162974855168
Do you have any idea who it might be?
Tom hamill
Hmm apparently the Saudis are into hand tans.
Amir Khalid
@Aleta:
I guess I was remembering a slightly younger Najib. They do look a bit alike, I’ll concede that; but this guy is short and a lot pudgier in the face.
Aleta
@Amir Khalid: I think Trump etc. may be standing on an elevated base around the orb.
daryljfontaine
@Adam L Silverman: Let’s hear it for the Rainbow Tour; it’s been an incredible success…
D
sm*t cl*de
@Another Scott:
Job creation scheme, where the well-connected can make an appearance one day a week.
Barney
@NotMax: Not a renamed Heritage Foundation – a worldwide development of the “Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice” . Really:
The CPVPV are those nice people who push naked girls fleeing a burning building back into it to die, because nudity is that wrong.
You can be sure Trump won’t be letting US government reports like this out again:
Waspuppet
“When you’re a star they let you do it.”
Aleta
‘No Puppet’ Series No. 121
rikyrah
@Adam L Silverman:
The curve for unqualified mediocre White Men continues.???
Bobby Thomson
@Redshift: Wow. When he’s lost the Randians . . . .
TBDBITL
So the Saudis got Trump his very own Orgasmatron?
Just One More Canuck
@Adam L Silverman: I hope the Pope will use precedent and make him wait on his knees for three days and nights
Librarian
@Adam L Silverman: Bannon apparently has already returned to DC with Preibus.
Malcolm
@Lizzy L: Caption: Trump and the Saudis commune with Sauron through the Palantir.
hedgehog the occasional commenter
Hail Hydra!
Sasha
It’s like a Jon McNaughton painting made flesh.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: My God, you weren’t kidding?
nasruddin
Eenie meanie, chili beanie, the spirits are about to speak….
mr_gravity
Domini domini domini, you’re all Catholics now!
No One You Know
Got a question. Am I the only one who’s having problems actually reading the site because there are now so many links and Twitter references that any semblance of narrative is breaking up?
It’s almost as if we are now inside Trump’s mind.
ETA: I’m 100% mobile, so smartphone screen size is driving the lament.
Steeplejack
@No One You Know:
Are you using the desktop or mobile version of the site? The former is pretty much unreadable for me on my phone.
Steeplejack
@No One You Know:
Are you using the desktop or mobile version of the site? The former is awful on my phone screen. Mobile version is somewhat better.