A friend from across the street texted me today to ask if my cable was out, and it was about 6 pm and I had not had the tv on all day, so I told him I would go downstairs and check. Went down, turned it on, and Mike Pence was yammering away. I immediately turned it off, texted my friend and said “I turned on my tv and Mike Pence was talking so first off, fuck you very much for that, and second, no, my cable is not out.”
If you think about it, that’s pretty insane, really. We’re in the midst of a global pandemic and on the downward slope to a global depression, and the people who matter the least to me in making informed decisions for my future are the President and Vice-President. I literally will not listen to anything they tell me to do, because A.) they are fucking idiots and B.) they are DANGEROUS idiots. It’s a helluva way to run the country.
And it’s not just them. It’s a majority of the Republicans. That idiot in Georgia who we know stole his election just yesterday admitted he had no idea that the virus could be transmitted by asymptomatic people, something we have known for MONTHS.
They just can’t be trusted with anything.
Mike in NC
But Matt Gaetz rocks a mean gasmask.
philpm
Just saw this tweet about Jared and about threw my laptop through the window:
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1245852517474295809?s=20
Mike in DC
Wait until you find out how shitty the Senate Majority leader is!
dmsilev
Look, you think it’s easy to zoom to the top of the ‘stupidest Republican’ leaderboard? I mean, there’s some serious competition. We should be impressed.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I think Dunning-Kruger has to be renamed
dmsilev
@philpm: This is arguably worse, for the complete and total self-owning:
https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1245897958958215168
Adam L Silverman
@philpm: Was just about to post it. They’ve broken the Union. According to this understanding, there is no Union. There are 50 states, plus DC and the territories (not sure the latter even register for these knuckleheads) and there is the Federal government, but these chucklefucks don’t understand that the Federal government is THE national government of the US for all Americans.
Amir Khalid
From over here, sometimes the Republican handling of the pandemic looks like stupidity, incompetence, and/or laziness. Sometimes it looks more like deliberate sabotage.
TS (the original)
I just got home from a run to the shop – not only tissues but TP – and the pharmacy had some masks. The first news I read was this
US Navy fires captain who sought help for coronavirus-stricken ship
In the age of trump don’t you dare ask for help. It might tell Americans exactly what is happening
(Apologies if this is old news – it’s new down under)
dmsilev
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Ithink a lot of voters will he giving a lot of thought about having a competent manager in a time of crisis… and therefore voting for Joe Biden.
Adam L Silverman
@dmsilev: Actually, from the reporting, it appears that his people were supplying him with articles from The Federalist that were all claiming it was overblown, a hoax, a Democratic plot, etc.
dmsilev
@Adam L Silverman:
Puerto Rico and hurricane response suggests strongly that the answer there is ‘no’.
Edit: to your larger point, I would note that Florida and several other states have gotten what they ask for from the Federal stockpile. By odd coincidence, all of those states both voted for Trump in 2016 and have Republican governors who suck up to him now. The Union exists, in his view, for the benefit of him primarily and for his supporters to a lesser extent.
Redshift
I really did not ask to participate in a simulation of what it would be like if we’d kept the Articles of Confederation.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I think of all the resentful rubes who voted for trump cause he was gonna stick to elites like me and Barack Obama, and then he turned the greatest national crisis in generations over to his son-in-law, the third generation trust-fund baby whose convicted felon pappy had to bribe him into Harvard, where he pretended to be an entrepreneur because he would call plumbers to fix toilets at the apartment building his family bought him so he could call himself an entrepreneur.
bluefish
Fuck Trump.
LeftCoastYankee
IIRC George Carlin had a joke to the affect that the Republican message is “Government is bad, vote for us and we’ll prove it.”
Anne Laurie
@Adam L Silverman: Override my scheduled music post if you wanna — that’ll keep.
You gonna post about the USS Theodore Roosevelt / the Parris Island cluster, or is that too close to your off-blog remit?
philpm
@dmsilev: Yeah, that’s what led me to the other one.
It also indirectly led me to this as well: Pandemic may finally push Kushner Cos’ Times Square retail space into default
rikyrah
You can’t believe that Muthaphucka in Georgia. He didn’t give a shyt until the hospitals in rural Georgia are being overrun. He knew.???
The Moar You Know
He’s not that stupid. Nobody is. That is what is known as a “lie”.
ETA: damn, jinx, Rikyrah
philpm
@The Moar You Know: I don’t think Kemp is stupid, or necessarily lying, just that he’s evilly indifferent to people other than himself, just like his idol.
cain
Here is something to enrage y’all, OKeefe posted this to twitter – https://www.projectveritas.com/news/army-national-guard-says-covid-19-media-coverage-overblown-its-the-flu-im-in/ – basically giving misinformation about how all htis was overblown and it is just the flu. I don’t know how they found a national guardsman to say stupid shit, but yeah…
He got pilloried on twitter even by the right wing noise machine. Both twitter and facebook removed the post.
It’s stupid shit like this that will make the virus continue to hang around – I think literally they plan on killing their base. Pastors are defying the govt and holding in person church gatherings. It’s unbelievable. I guess they are going to keep doing this until there can be no more grift because their pool of folks are all dead.
Redshift
@dmsilev: When you’ve surrounded yourself with yes-men your entire life, anyone who doesn’t tell you what you want to hear is “not a good manager.” Because it’s unpossible that they could actually know something that could contradict what you’ve decided in your beautiful mind, unimpeded by any actual evidence.
Get ready for governors’ poor management blamed for all those people dying after their carefully constructed accurate projections and requests turn out to be right.
Calouste
@The Moar You Know: Someone posted a link on one of the earlier threads proving that he was indeed lying today, as the link was from a week or two ago and he said then that the coronavirus was transmissible between humans.
Anyway, just like all of the liars, I hope his stay in hospital if he catches it will be short.
cain
@Redshift:
Yeah, but what is Trump going to say to all the Red States? You know it will be kid gloves and he’ll even probably let it slip something about the election, because it will tell his base that the red states are going to be taken care of.
But as I’ve said before, he won’t be able to help them.. that stockpiling by the feds is for the red states, you can bet. But it won’t be enough.
I’m calling Kate our gov and basically telling her that she can’t count on the feds and that she better just start getting the local businesses to start making all the PPEs locally and out of reach of FEMA.
Redshift
@LeftCoastYankee: Yeah, or as I like to put it, if you vote for people who say government can’t work, don’t be surprised when you get a government that doesn’t work.
Calouste
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Donny-Kushner?
joel hanes
If Chanel Rion was there, again, (and she was), all the other people not on the stage should have left.
Permanently.
Calouste
@Adam L Silverman: Could you find a way to not post the faces of those two murderers?
Brachiator
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I have not actually seen Young Jared speak at all during this crisis. It is probably best for my health that I don’t.
It is ridiculous that some people now blandly expect that Trump will always insert a family member into a team responsible for something. And it is ridiculous that nobody calls bullshit on this.
But like his Dear Leader, Young Jared is long on castigation and short on leadership. He also has mastered the art of asserting abilities despite the absence of any real accomplishment.
So, the federal government is not responsible for anything, but the states are fucking up.
What is anyone supposed to do with this?
What a shitshow.
Adam L Silverman
@dmsilev: That’s not a Union, that’s a protection racket.
danielx
@dmsilev:
When you have to top Louie Gohmert….
Okay, get your mind out of the sewer.
Uncle Omar
Back in my youth the daily press briefing in Viet Nam during that particular cock-up was known as the “Five O’clock Follies.” Trump’s daily “briefings” should be called “The Six O’clock Shit-Show.”
Quiltingfool
@Amir Khalid: I’m beginning to wonder about sabotage, too. So hard for me to wrap my mind around the vast amount of incompetence in the Executive Branch; then again, we are talking about Trump, so Occam’s Razor says go for incompetence. I swear, Trump is the poster boy for the saying, “Better to be lucky than good,” because he is the luckiest m*therf***er in the universe. I just hope his luck is fixing to run out and soon.
Amir Khalid
@Adam L Silverman:
Trump can’t/won’t distinguish between the two.
LongHairedWeirdo
@dmsilev: I dunno about anyone else, but I hope the yiddish powers that be are replacing the canonical example of chutzpah, “begging for leniency, for the murder of one’s parents, due to one’s recent orphaned state” with “creating a disaster, and then claiming no one could have seen it coming, and none should be critical, instead, praising the ‘war president’ because there’s a DISASTER going on, cf Donald Trump”.
I feel so twisted up right now, you know? I don’t *want* scores of thousands of people to die. I want some magic wand to be waved and fix all this. And yet, that “poof, like a miracle, it’s gone” resolution would only encourage the GOP to be even more feckless (which, I confess, doesn’t seem possible – the next step seems that it must be actual malice).
Adam L Silverman
@Redshift: Or the Confederate constitution.
Geoboy
John – you give the felon currently occupying the goveror’s mansion in Georgia too much credit. He’s not an imbecile – he’s know for months that there’s asymptomatic transmission of coronavirus. He’s just too cowardly chickenshit to do anything until Hair Orange Fuhrer gives it his seal of approval, the guy’s batshit insane campaign commercial threatening his daughter’s date with a shotgun nonwithstanding. Oh, and in case it isn’t clear – fuck this guy. Thousands of Georgians will pay with their lives for his cowardice.
dopey-o
@Amir Khalid: sometimes it looks like more than deliberate sabotage. Once is an accident, twice is coincidence. Twenty times starts to look like a re-election strategy. https://pressrun.media/p/medias-taboo-topic-whys-trump-doing
TS (the original)
@Brachiator:
Not going to argue with that – Jarod & the F.I.L. revealing they have zero manager skills. Just saying that in public indicates their total lack of anything resembling a skill.
Adam L Silverman
@Anne Laurie: Not tonight. I’ve been discussing it with two retired general officers I consult for. And frankly I’m so disgusted I don’t even want to attempt it this evening. Maybe tomorrow.
joel hanes
@Amir Khalid:
At the White House, it’s a mob bust-out — they’re frantic to steal enough quickly enough to get through the collapse of their leveraged real-estate empire.
There are a couple Republican governors who have surprised by their ability to hear, understand, and decide — e.g., DeWine, Hogan; but for the most part, the Republican Party long ago ejected anyone not blinded by their own ideological priors, religion, and bigotry.
Brachiator
@cain:
But it won’t matter, no matter how much stuff Trump stockpiles for the benefit of red states. The fundamental problem is his incompetence. Every action he takes that ignores the advice of the experts makes things worse.
The governors of red states who follow Trump’s lead are in a world of hurt.
ETA: I’m thinking about how Trump suggested that he might quarantine New York. To keep the virus away from other states.
It would make more sense to track every college student who went to a crowded Spring Break party in Florida and then left the state.
Martin
The gov of GA knew it could be transmitted asymptomatically weeks ago. He’s just lying.
Adam L Silverman
@cain: That’s okay, I’ve forward it to a couple of general officers, who will make sure it gets to someone at the National Guard Bureau. That Soldier is done.
Amir Khalid
@Quiltingfool:
Someone, I think in a tweet that was posted here, noted that an incompetent will occasionally blunder into doing the right thing — but in four years the Trump administration has never made such a blunder. That does make one think, no?
Redshift
@cain: I expect he’s thinking he’ll tell them he’s doing a great job and taking care of them, and he’s engaging in wishful thinking that everything will be fine, and that they were infected by the Chinese and Those People from the big cities. Usual hate-mongering, inability to think past the next news cycle or give a damn about anyone else even when it would be better for him if he did.
Martin
@philpm: He noted from his own mouth that it could be transmitted asymptomatically 2 weeks ago. He knew.
Elizabelle
@TS (the original): Hi TS. We discussed Captain Brett Crozier’s firing in detail on Cheryl’s War of Words post, maybe 3 back.
Adam L Silverman
@cain: Those pastors are going to kill a lot of their congregants!
Elizabelle
We need to have trials. And prison sentences — long ones — after we get through this.
This is depraved indifference and malfeasance. Thousands upon thousands of people would not have died with a competent (and legitimate) president.
Brachiator
@Martin:
It’s just as bad, if not worse, if he were not lying. He’s the freaking governor. He is supposed to know these things.
He is supposed to have competent advisors who give him the facts when asked.
Elizabelle
@Adam L Silverman: If it could just remain the megachurch attendees, that would be OK. But they’re running riot through the communities, no?
Martin
I’ll note, Trump can funnel all the ventilators he wants to Florida, unless young Jareds dabbling in necromancy has in fact given him the power to raise the dead, their failure regarding the red states is going to be all too clear. Florida had more fatalities the last 2 days than CA did, and they’re at least 2 weeks behind CA.
Duane
@philpm: Kushner steps from behind the curtain to reveal he’s an idiot. What a waste of an education. Maybe he’s been pretending to be in charge of something, like you do a child so they don’t have a fit. His business going kablooey may distract him from all his big-brain work. HA!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@philpm: The Right has been building their alternative reality of theirs since the ’70s. Quite possible Kemp until 24 hours ago was only listing to Wingnut news. One of the basic thesis of Modern Conservationism is all science is fake as part of a liberal conspiracy to turn the country socialist as show by evolution.
Adam L Silverman
@Amir Khalid: I’m aware.
Mnemosyne
@Adam L Silverman:
They’ve basically declared us a confederacy on their own authority. ?
Brachiator
@Adam L Silverman:
The pandemic is hurting lottery ticket sales.
I imagine that the order to shelter in place hurts some churches’ ability to collect tithes. But if you can get people to show up, and crowd them all in, you can pass the plate.
Martin
@Adam L Silverman: One of the biggest outbreaks in CA is a church up near Sacramento.
The reason I pushed so hard for the university to shut down is that universities are, by design, social places. We are antithetical to social distancing – every part of our design undermines the effort.
Churches are no different. 60 asymptomatic church choir members in WA got together for a rehearsal, 45 contracted it, 2 died so far. A 75% transmission rate is wild.
Mnemosyne
@rikyrah:
That’s what I think, too. He knew, he just didn’t give a ?.
philpm
@Duane: That’s assuming that he ever got an education. And sadly, he’s not pretending, his shrunken-brain FIL is allowing him to take charge of numerous situations that require actual knowledge, skill, experience and tact, factors of which he has none of the above. Just imagine the outrage if Sasha or Malia had been of age and Obama allowed them to do this. That’s the kind of outrage that should be exploding right now x 1000.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Adam L Silverman:
Adam, ever heard of a Yasha Levine
It’s a random question, I know, but I was just curious and I happened across this crank today. The dude thinks “Russiagate” and the reasonable suspicion of Putin’s Russia are “insane nativist conspiracies”
Adam L Silverman
@Elizabelle: Other than going out for groceries every ten days to two weeks, I wouldn’t know. I’ve been self isolating since the middle of February.
Anne Laurie
@Adam L Silverman: Fair enough.
Figured *someone* should bring it up, and it’s not like *I* know enough to do the topic justice!
Quiltingfool
@Amir Khalid:
You do have a good point. There should be at least one decent outcome from all his crappy decisions in 3 years, and I can’t think of one. So, is this malignant narcissistic sociopath really able to take direction from, shall we say, a certain Russian President? Possibly, with the right inducements, I guess.
delk
On the brighter side, we won’t have to witness the shit show Easter Lawn farce this year.
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: As Lincoln said at the Cooper Union in 1860:
Other than changing political parties, they haven’t changed in 160 years.
Martin
@Adam L Silverman: I hope I’m that articulate when I’m 151.
oatler.
I Saw a PBS doc on Henry XIII a couple weeks ago and was struck by the similarities to our current regime. Though with less beheadings. C’mon, Henry.
Adam L Silverman
@Brachiator: While almost all the megachurches, especially the prosperity gospel grifters, take online and over the phone donations, passing the plate is a huge weekly haul for them. Especially because it creates a great deal of social and peer pressure on the congregants to put something in each week because the people sitting around them and near them can see whether they put anything in and how much.
Barbara
@Martin: The lack of ventilators is awful, but in my view the PPE shortage is even worse. The fatality rate is high for ventilator dependent patients, it is a last ditch measure, but PPE is how you contain the spread, especially to HCW.
Adam L Silverman
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): The guy from the eXile?
Mnemosyne
@philpm:
It’s okay if rich white men do it, because it’s natural for them to be in charge and they are automatically better at everything than everyone else.
And they genuinely believe this. It’s not just big talk. They really think that any random high school dropout would be a better Supreme Court Justice than Sonia Sotomayor as long as he was white and male.
White male supremacy can never fail, it can only be failed.
Adam L Silverman
@Anne Laurie: It isn’t a problem that you asked. I just don’t have it in me to do a post on it tonight. It was a long, draining day.
Anne Laurie
Yes, they are… and for many of them, it’s purely about asserting THEIR AUTHORITAH over the ‘flock’ (and/or running the con for every last penny).
But it’s particularly tragic, because — as you know — Easter is the High Holidays of the Christian tradition, and a lot of genuine believers (even some of those pastors!) are gonna die for their faith. Or, worse, unintentionally kill their loved ones. It’s just been deeply, deeply internalized that you have to show up — and, of course, the communal celebration helps cement the ‘essential’ nature of attendance.
I’ll give the Pope this credit, he tried to convince ‘his people’ that God would forgive them staying home just this once, worshipping from their homes… but he can’t even keep his own ‘administrators‘ from undercutting him there.
Objective evidence against the strong-centralized-authority theory of political management, I guess…
dww44
@rikyrah: You are right. Told my spouse this morning that Kemp wasn’t that stupid. I don’t believe he actually believed what he said yesterday, he was just using what he thought was a credible rationale to do something he had been trying not to do, declare a state wide stay at home edict. He’s been well aware of what was going on in Albany Ga for several weeks.
Then again, he could be that much of an ideologue. This is what we have with Republican governance now. I’m counting on having an election next November and hoping, planning on there being a critical mass of sane voters who will deliver a whomping defeat to the GOP. Long overdue.
Duane
@philpm: It’s obvious why he’s been behind the scenes until now. Not ready for anytime. The poster-boy for nepotism.
Anne Laurie
@Adam L Silverman: Tracking!
Adam L Silverman
@Martin: I was editing it while you were being pedantic.
Adam L Silverman
@Anne Laurie: That’s because a significant number of his administrators have never accepted him as actually being the rightful pope.
Brachiator
@Adam L Silverman:
Pastor to parishoner: “Jed, I really appreciate your donating this week. Why don’t you throw a little extra in the plate, ’cause you know, you might not make it through this virus thing.”
However, for those who are religious and have religious institutions that are part of their lives, I would think that the ability to have online services, and to perhaps communicate online with people who are locked down can provide some comfort.
Duane
@Adam L Silverman: They should put credit card scanners on the back of the pews. You know, as a convenience.
Anne Laurie
Smart man!
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Adam L Silverman:
Yup that’s him. He seems like a real fucking kook. He likens all of the anti-Russian state coverage to antisemitism/anti-Slav racism among Americans. He says this here:
Respectable Racism
I discovered him by following a link from reddit’s r/coronavirus subreddit to The Gray Zone, a Naked Capitalist-esque site that seems to be chalk full of Lefty Purism, here
The last linked article talks about the coronavirus outbreak where he links to his own blog apparently, and falsely equates “Russia hysteria” with the right’s racist scapegoating of China
What really broke the camel’s back for me, is this fucking gem:
Emphasis mine. Does he really fucking think that nobody could identify if a virus is man-made or not? He beclowned himself with that alone.
Anyway, just wanted to share the Crazy and get your perspective since what this guy writes about overlaps a bit with what you have written about national security
Brachiator
@oatler.:
Henry XIII?
Anne Laurie
Yeah, I noticed that Melania (aka ‘the smarter half’) jumped at the chance to cancel the Lawn Roll early — late February, IIRC.
One more counter-indication to the whole WH However could we ever have been expected to predict excuse-kabuki.
Flea, RN
philpm
@Duane: Pretty soon they’ll figure out how to scan it while it’s still in your wallet as you walk through the door, and decide how much you can afford to “donate” that week.
Brachiator
@Martin:
We have had to re-think the way we go about life and re-engineer society. Universities, schools, churches, workplaces. Prisons. Every place where we would usually send people to be together, we now have to do the opposite.
Related to this, I was listening to the news this morning, and some official had to or wanted to cancel a directive to send elderly patients being treated for various ailments to nursing homes. Sadly, nursing homes are some of the worst places to be for these patients.
Another Scott
@Duane: There are churches that accept bitcoin.
Because of course there are.
Cheers,
Scott.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@oatler.: listening to Wolf Hall, the parallels between trump and Mantel’s Henry are amazing: impulsive, at once arrogant and insecure, needy and imperious, short-term thinker, demanding gratification, brutal (by proxy)….
Brachiator
@Flea, RN:
What the hell does this even mean? “Our stockpile?” To do what with?
Why is anyone, including the freaking GOP leadership, continuing to let Trump appoint this idiot to anything?
Anne Laurie
I’m just further confirmed in my choice to walk away from that faith community the day I graduated from parochial school. Might’ve been harder if I hadn’t left for a college 12 hours away… but then, getting away from that community was one of the reasons I chose a distant college.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Brachiator:
That’s what I’d like to know! Is he referring to the federal government when he says “our”? The national stockpile is intended for the entire country because only the national government has the money and resources to maintain such a stockpile.
Kushner is a fucking dweeb who thinks he’s smarter than he actually is and is getting innocent people killed
Adam L Silverman
@Brachiator: I suppose. I’m not really big on ritual and ceremony.
Adam L Silverman
@Duane: I find the Kol Nidre appeal at synagogue on Yom Kippur distasteful, so you’re talking to the wrong guy.
Anne Laurie
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): You wanna follow some Soviet immigrants, I’d suggest Julia Ioffe, Mig Greengard, and Slava Malamud instead. They’re pessimists, but not deliberately stupid / crazy.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Anne Laurie:
Ever noticed a tendency among some protestants that talk about Roman Catholicism as if it’s not just another branch of Christianity? And not even in an “those evil papists” way either, just out of ignorance? It’s really weird. I’ve had to correct somebody I know about this at least twice.
Adam L Silverman
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): The eXile crowd are strange. The accurate assessments of what Russia did in advance of the 2016 election, during it, since the 2016 election, and is still doing is in no way anti-Semitic. It is quite a stretch to make that accusation even if a significant number of the oligarchs, who are also Russian and post Soviet state organized crime leaders, who report to and support Putin and are, in turn, supported and protected by him are of Jewish descent.
It is important to remember that the eXile reporters were into, by their own admission, a bunch of really wild and insane stuff when they worked their and lived in Moscow. As much as I appreciated Taibi’s writing about the 2008 financial crisis and the bailouts in 2009, the man has far too much in common with Roy Moore. And that was before he decided to go all in on “the Russia stuff is a hoax”.
Adam L Silverman
@Brachiator: You know, the unluckiest King Henry.
Origuy
@Martin: I tried to post on the church in Sacramento earlier, but the posts never got through. It’s a Russian Pentecostal church; more than six dozen members are confirmed infected.
They are also running paramilitary youth boot camps supported by the Kremlin, according to this article.
Adam L Silverman
@Anne Laurie: John Paul II did a lot of damage to the Church, especially in regard to rolling back John XXIII’s reforms. Which is why he was chosen to be pope.
Adam L Silverman
@Anne Laurie: And Greengard’s boss Gary Kasparov.
CaseyL
@Brachiator: To sell. To give to cronies to sell. To give, selectively, to people who “deserve” them.
Of all the things that make me angry, this might be what makes me absolutely incandescent with rage: they are sabotaging the emergency response in order to profiteer from supplies that were paid for with our money, for our benefit in an emergency.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Adam L Silverman:
Strange is one way to describe them. It’s like reading something from a parallel universe, it’s so out there and wrong.
This Levine guy doesn’t seem the type to trust American intelligence agencies (or western ones in general). He seems to view everything through a “The US is always bad no matter what any other country does” and an “Being anti-Russia is racist” lens that colors pretty much all of his writings.
He reminds me a lot of Glenn Greenwald because he just comes across as being contrarian. He even seems to buy into Putin’s framing of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution
joel hanes
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
All kings are insane.
The role is structured that way — it’s almost impossible for a king to be a well-adjusted person, or to stay so if he might have started out relatively sane.
Some few managed better than most.
This was first brought home to me by LeGuin’s _Left_Hand_Of_Darkness_, when the Envoy, Genly Ai, has an audience with the king of Karhide.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Ruckus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I’ve seen people with almost zero personal awareness.
I’ve never until the last 4 yrs seen anyone who works seamlessly at increasing their negative personal awareness.
joel hanes
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Is he referring to the federal government when he says “our”?
The members of the Trump crime family believe they _are_ the federal government, or the only part of it that matters. Kushner was explaining that the remaining stocks belong to the Trumps, to use for their own benefit, or to bestow on allies and syncophants at their pleasure.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@joel hanes:
Well, fuck them. Do they honestly think that people aren’t going to want their heads after this is all over?
joel hanes
@Adam L Silverman:
which is why I always refer to the man by his actual name, Ratzinger.
CaseyL
Not sure if one of the other Washingtonian jackals has already mentioned this, but Governor Inslee has just extended the lockdown through May 4. Current data modeling suggests state cases will peak around April 11.
Interesting press conference. Inslee says the state expects “millions” of masks over the next couple of weeks, purchasing directly from manufacturers in the US and overseas. The state is also looking into the possibility of sterilizing and re-using N95 masks.
Anne Laurie
Well, I grew up inside The Church (Catholic), so I heard it from the other side. There’s a common theme in the three overarching ‘people of the Book’ faiths — Jewish, Catholic/Christian, Muslim — the older branches insist those latecomers are adolescent heresies, and the newer ones claim they’re ‘purified’ versions of the outdated primitive versions.
So the Jews shake their heads at the johnny-come-lately ‘Christians’ chasing after a random Jewish prophet/terrorist (Yeshuah ben Joseph) with a great publicist (Paul of Damascus). Catholics say there’s only a so-called Protestant faith because Martin Luther & Henry VIII wanted to have sex with people they weren’t supposed to be considering as partners (Luther was a supposed-to-be-celibate priest who ended up marrying a nun). And the Jews say that Mohammad just got his knickers in a twist because he couldn’t, as a convert, be a real priest in the Temple, so he stomped off to start a ‘movement’ where he could be The Guy in Charge.
From the other side, as you know, the Catholics say their messiah ‘replaced’ the primitive Old Testament with a new improved version; the Protestants say the corrupt Roman Church needed to be replaced by their better decentralized version. And the Muslims say, diplomatically, that the Jewish prophets & the Christian saints were just precursors heralding the True Prophet, PBUH.
I’m old and tired, so these days I just nod & change the subject.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Ruckus
@Amir Khalid:
It is deliberate sabotage. It’s just that the republican voters and vlad are the ones to blame. They elected people incapable of cognizant thought. Or any other kind for that matter.
Adam L Silverman
@joel hanes: Ratzinger’s papal name is Benedict XVI.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Anne Laurie:
Thanks, perhaps I’ll check them out, though I don’t like defeatism or fatalism
joel hanes
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
In generations of fraud, grift, tax-evasion, and organized criminal schemes, in the combined Trump/Kushner axis, only Kushner Sr. has ever suffered any consequence that had a serious effect on his life.
So they literally don’t much worry that people will want their heads — there’s always been someone they screwed over who wants their head, and they’ve always been able to make it go away. They literally cannot conceive that their thieving incompetence will come to a bad end, because it never has.
And they may be right. I have no way of knowing if the nation will be into “look forward, not back” again if and when the Democrats again have control of the national government, or if we’ll do a truth and reconciliation thing, or if we’ll do trials and life imprisonment, or tumbrels and lampposts. What happens in the next six months depends critically on too many unknowns, and on happenstance.
It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.
Brachiator
@Adam L Silverman:
That might be Henry II, whose son’s all rebelled against him. Or Henry VI, who was incompetent.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@CaseyL:
So has Ohio; until May 1st. We’re expecting the peak to happen by mid-April or late April in Ohio
Battelle in Columbus, a non-profit org, has developed a machine that can sterilize N95 respirators and surgical masks up to 20 times. The process can sterilize up to 80,000 masks a day
Ruckus
@cain:
You actually are right.
This is stupid shit of the highest order. However the problem is the people doing the stupidest shit believe everything the right wing stupid machine tells them, and are going to get us all killed trying to prove that they are right. If they’d just all lock themselves into one of those evangelical palaces and set themselves on fire we could get on with our lives, but no they have to attempt to prove all their bullshit is the absolute truth. And that will be the thing that kills a lot of innocent people.
joel hanes
@Adam L Silverman:
Ah.
The internet is a superb vehicle for making a fool of oneself before a large audience.
Thanks for the correction.
And now to go read about John Paul II
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Ivanka will probably retweet this because he called her and upper East Side socialite and not a jumped-up bridge-and-tunnel arriviste
Adam L Silverman
@joel hanes: You’re not completely wrong, Benedict XVI was chosen to finish what John Paul II was chosen to do.
Brachiator
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Tendency?
That is quite an understatement.
Growing up in Texas, I don’t think I even knew anyone who was Catholic until my family moved to California.
Wait, that’s not really true. I went to Catholic school for one year, but my mother was adamant that I was not to be instructed in the faith. And I was mesmerized by portraits of Jesus with a “sacred heart” hovering outside his body. That’s about all I knew about the religion.
Strangely enough, I was pretty much raised without religion, but I was aware of a weird Southern hostility to Catholicism.
The natural presumption was that you were a Baptist.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@joel hanes:
Kusher et al live in such privilege that they cannot conceive that something bad might happen to them as a result of their own actions. Things tend to change when bodies start piling up
CaseyL
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Good on Battelle!
Gvg
@oatler.: I have been wondering who Henry the thirteenth was? Do you mean Henry VIII (8th)? Beheadings sound like VIII.
Ruckus
@Duane:
How do you know they don’t?
But I doubt they do because that would have a cost of processing. Cash doesn’t have that. OK other than handling bills with a virus on them.
TS (the original)
@Elizabelle:
Thanks Elizabelle – Probably while I was out and about – I’ll go back & read it all. Takes awhile for things to reach down under. I guess we are buried with our own coronavirus news.
Sally
@joel hanes: I always refer to every pope by his actual name. My RC relatives tell me I’m disrespectful. Yes, I am.
rikyrah
@Amir Khalid:
Deliberate sabotage
Mnemosyne
@Adam L Silverman:
I’ve always assumed that the second thing was strongly related to kompromat collected on the first thing, but anyway … ?
Mnemosyne
@joel hanes:
And the major TBI that Henry VIII suffered in a jousting accident that left him unconscious for a full day didn’t help. Most historians think that he had a pretty big personality change after that injury.
Mrs. D. Ranged in AZ
@Brachiator: The unluckiest Henry is me. According to genealogy I am descended from one of the Henry’s either the 2nd or the 4th, can’t remember at this point. One of their bastard sons produced me and here I am suffering under the narcissism of the Kushers and the Trumps. And I would hazard to guess that many of you are descended from many of those a****** Kings as well. Maybe the sins of the fathers do actually visit their descendants. As much as I would like to rage against the machine I know my ancestors and current family members played a part in bringing these stupid f****** to power. I have been rendered speechless by the blatant sociopathy of our current leaders. My children knew that asymptomatic people could transmit coronavirus months ago. I don’t even know how to begin to address this kind of triangulation by Gov. Kemp.
Mnemosyne
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
I have been told to my face that Catholicism is actually a pagan religion because we (allegedly) worship saints instead of Jesus, so …
Ian R
Even putting aside the (many and compelling) current reasons why we shouldn’t ever let Republicans run things, let’s not forget that unified Republican governments always lead to financial crashes.
Craigie
@LeftCoastYankee:
Actually, that was PJ O’Rourke, and the quote is
Yutsano
@CaseyL: Looks like I have my projected day to return to work. And I am so going to order dinner from a local business tomorrow.
MoCA Ace
@Amir Khalid:
In all fairness he is no garden variety incompetent. The combination of nuclear grade narcissism, aggressive ignorance, and lack of any shred of human compassion leads him to whole new levels of incompetence. He is truly an incompetence savant,
CaseyL
@Yutsano: I guess you can’t do what you do from home…?
Kattails
Just stopping by before bedtime to mention that I scored 2 bags of artisanal bread flour at King Arthur, and that Jared Kushner has one of the most punchable faces I have ever seen in my life.
JaySinWA
I do believe it is past time for the commander in chief to be relieved of his command.
frosty
@Adam L Silverman: I beg to differ. As dengre noted many years ago, there are three parties in America: Republicans, Democrats, Confederates. Rs and Ds have (until recently) remained the same. Nixon moved the Confederates from D to R. And I would say that the Rs have become mostly Confederates at this point, so maybe there’s only two parties left.
Captain C
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Dunning-Kushner?
(Someone has to have beaten me to this.)
Kattails
@JaySinWA: And I sincerely hope that every cowardly, toadying sycophantic Republican who failed to do their duty when “impeach and remove” was in front of their noses goes down in ignominy.
Brachiator
Apparently, even the country of Georgia is a problem. From a BBC News story. The Orthodox Church there is still having public services, and uses a shared spoon for their version of Communion. A priest interviewed said that he believes that the blood of Christ sterilizes the spoon.
We shall see.
JaySinWA
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): To be fair, when my wife was going to a catholic private school as a non-catholic, her peers would describe the Catholic church as the one true church, with no irony.
joel hanes
@frosty:
Nixon moved the Confederates from D to R
Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act made it possible for Nixon to do that.
cain
@Brachiator:
You are right it won’t matter, he’s incompetent – the people around him are also incompetent and ideologues as well. Those states are going to get fucked.
They are still going to blame someone, anyone, but not them. They will likely even accuse blue states of malfeasance that somehow they knew stuff and didn’t share and very very anti-american. Fuckers.
cain
@Adam L Silverman:
Yeah, it’s going to be a shit show in those states.
I’ve yet to hear any of these people say this plague is because of gay marriage, should be fun to explain when it is folks like these that are going to die.
I sincerely believe we are going to kill off a generation.
Caracal
Upvote times One Million
artem1s
@Brachiator:
and you can collect on their estates that they no doubt have willed over to these grifters. I hate to say it, but I suspect that these cultists would declare this ‘boon’ a sign of god’s will if all their elderly members die and leave money to the ‘church’. I also believe they are completely capable of the sin of omitting to tell their parishioners that they are planning on reaping the profits off their misery and death. Grift all the way down.
Racer X
@Adam L Silverman: Does that mean we can all stop paying federal taxes?