Breaking: Bannon Stripped of NSC Role.

The substantive impact of Steve Bannon’s exit from the NSC on foreign policy remains to be seen. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters.

The substantive impact of Steve Bannon’s exit from the NSC on foreign policy remains to be seen. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters.

Seems there’s been a bit of a shake-up. Not much news at the moment, I’m sure this story will develop.

Donald Trump’s political strategist Steve Bannon has lost his place on the national security council in a staff shakeup, documents show.

An 4 April presidential memorandum took Bannon, the former Breitbart News executive and chief White House link to the nationalist rightwing, off the US’s main body for foreign policy and national security decision-making. It also restores the traditional roles of the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and the director of national intelligence onto the NSC.

While the revamp is likely to be seen as a victory for Trump’s second national security adviser, army lieutenant general HR McMaster, the substantive impact of the shakeup remains to be seen. A parallel security structure in the Eisenhower executive office building, known as the Strategic Initiatives Group, reports to Bannon, whose closeness to Trump is a signal-marker of influence in this administration.

As noted by The Guardian, this will not remove Bannon’s influence on Trump and the regime. It is good news as far as the NSC is concerned. Via The Guardian.

The Problem With Trump: Part IV.

Los Angeles Times.

Los Angeles Times.

Part IV of the LA Times’ The Problem With Trump is up: Trump’s War on Journalism.

…This may seem like bizarre behavior from a man who consumes the news in print and on television so voraciously and who is in many ways a product of the media. He comes from reality TV, from talk radio with Howard Stern, from the gossip pages of the New York City tabloids, for whose columnists he was both a regular subject and a regular source.

But Trump’s strategy is pretty clear: By branding reporters as liars, he apparently hopes to discredit, disrupt or bully into silence anyone who challenges his version of reality. By undermining trust in news organizations and delegitimizing journalism and muddling the facts so that Americans no longer know who to believe, he can deny and distract and help push his administration’s far-fetched storyline.

It’s a cynical strategy, with some creepy overtones. For instance, when he calls journalists “enemies of the people,” Trump (whether he knows it or not) echoes Josef Stalin and other despots.

Click on over for the full article. A Must Read.

Give God His Rainbow Back! Now!

Worst example of cultural appropriation ever: LGBTs stole the rainbow from God. It’s his. He invented it. Gen. 9:11-17. Give it back.

People have been making nonstop fun of Mr. Fischer for his indignant tweet, but rather than just letting it slide, he’s back, with a double down demand.

“The rainbow is God’s,” Fischer said. “God invented the rainbow—look at Genesis 9:11-17—He invented it, it’s His thing, He put it in the sky as a promise that he would never again destroy the earth through a flood. Are you listening Al Gore? Al Gore, you do not need to worry about the planet being destroyed by floodwaters. Why? Because God has put His rainbow in the sky to let you and everybody else know, ‘I’m never going to do that again.’”

The LGBTQ community, Fischer warned, “is using something that doesn’t belong to you. That’s cultural appropriation … You’ve culturally appropriated something that doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to God, it’s His idea and you need to give it back.”

The first thought here is how any being so utterly weak as to not be able to retake a rainbow, well why bother with it? Apparently, it never bothers Christians that they simultaneously exalt the might of Jehovah, and his absolute weakness. Also, Jehovah is a latecomer in the god business, and a fair amount of the old testament stories are lifted from earlier peoples and their mythologies, so there’s no reason to think ol’ Jehovah had a lock on a rainbow. There is the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, which the OT writers shamelessly stole from when hammering out Genesis. What about the Bifrost? That’s a whole rainbow bridge, from Asgard to Midgard, which would kind of put Jehovah’s measly rainbow to shame, yeah? What about Cuchavira, god of the rainbow? How about the Greek Goddess Iris, who is the personification of the rainbow, a messenger, and the link between the gods and humanity? Iris had long been in business before your sorry god was dreamed up, so that weak god of yours loses this one. There are plenty of other rainbow ties to various mythologies as well.

You also lose the whole “you can’t have a rainbow flag!” tantrum, too. Rainbow flags are not new, have been used for centuries. So, about that cultural appropriation business…of all people, Christians need to shut the fuck up about cultural appropriation of any kind, seriously, because the list of your crimes in that category are damn near endless.

Via RWW.

Stephen King on the Tiny Tyrant.

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Stephen King has an article up at The Guardian, pondering the rise of the Tiny Tyrant, and the hows and whys of it. Entertaining reading.

I had written about such men before. In The Dead Zone, Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins. He is laughed at when he runs for the House of Representatives (part of his platform is a promise to rocket America’s trash into outer space), but he wins again. When Johnny Smith, the novel’s precognitive hero, shakes his hand, he realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war three.

Big Jim Rennie in Under The Dome is cut from the same cloth. He’s a car salesman (selling being a key requirement for the successful politician), who is the head selectman in the small town of Chester’s Mill, when a dome comes down and cuts the community off from the world. He’s a crook, a cozener and a sociopath, the worst possible choice in a time of crisis, but he’s got a folksy, straight-from-the-shoulder delivery that people relate to. The fact that he’s incompetent at best and downright malevolent at worst doesn’t matter.

Both these stories were written years ago, but Stillson and Rennie bear enough of a resemblance to the current resident of the White House for me to flatter myself I have a country-fair understanding of how such men rise: first as a joke, then as a viable alternative to the status quo, and finally as elected officials who are headstrong, self-centered and inexperienced. Such men do not succeed to high office often, but when they do, the times are always troubled, the candidates in question charismatic, their proposed solutions to complex problems simple, straightforward and impractical. The baggage that should weigh these hucksters down becomes magically light, lifting them over the competition like Carl Fredricksen in the Pixar film Up. Trump’s negatives didn’t drag him down; on the contrary, they helped get him elected.

I decided to convene six Trump voters to discover how and why all this happened. Because I selected them from the scores of make-believe people always bouncing around in my head (sometimes their chatter is enough to drive me bugshit), I felt perfectly OK feeding them powerful truth serum before officially convening the round table. And because they are fictional – my creatures – they all agreed to this. They gulped the serum down in Snapple iced tea, and half an hour later we began. My panelists were:

Click on over for the full story.

Word Wednesday.

Chthonic

Adjective.

Also Chthonian.

Of or relating to the underworld.
Of or relating to the deities, spirits, and other beings dwelling under the earth.

[Origin: from Greek khthonios in or under the earth, from khthōn earth.]

1840-1850.

What’s bi-sub syndrome, anyway?” “Don’t know. I tried to look up some of Dr. Abraham’s work and found something titled ‘The Evolution of Hierarchical Behavior Expressed Through Chthonic Fetishization,’ and gave up after that. I don’t speak academic fluently enough.” – The Killer Wore Leather, Laura Antoniou.

Conservation Lab: Renaissance Cabinet.

French Renaissance Cabinet from Burgundy, dated 1580 (minor additions in late 1850s), from the J. Paul Getty Museum collection.

French Renaissance Cabinet from Burgundy, dated 1580 (minor additions in late 1850s), from the J. Paul Getty Museum collection.

Conservators look through microscopes to gather information about an object’s composition and construction—and on a regular day in the lab, knowing such things is an end unto itself. “It’s just interesting, that’s all,” one conservator once told me. When an object’s history is uncertain, however, those scientific results take on layers of meaning, each a potential bit of evidence that can help solve the mystery. In 2001, conservators at the J. Paul Getty Museum undertook a thorough reexamination of a massive French cabinet long believed to be a fake: a 19th century piece designed to resemble Renaissance-era handiwork. Zooming in on a single brass tack turned out to yield important clues as to the cabinet’s making, and helped prove its authenticity.

When J. Paul Getty purchased the cabinet in 1971 for $1,700, curators warned against the acquisition. The cabinet’s pristine condition aroused suspicions, as did the coating of colored wax on its surface, which suggested someone had tried to make it appear older than it was. Experts concluded that the piece was likely produced in the 19th century, when Renaissance-style furniture was all the rage among American industrialist tycoons—prompting many fakes to voyage across the Atlantic. Even the cabinet’s excessively florid style worked against it: “A present-day tendency to associate heavy forms, sharp carving and dense decorative detail with neo-Renaissance cabinetry perhaps explains why further suspicions arose. The decoration almost suggests 19th century horror vacui,” noted curator Jack Hinton and conservator Arlen Heginbotham in a 2006 article about the object.

Heginbotham looked past all that noisy decoration and zeroed in on the science. Dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating, showed that the oak tree used in the object’s construction was harvested in the mid-1570s, and the surface wood and interior silk lining were carbon dated to the 15th and 16th centuries. Conservators then focused on the brass tacks used to attach the silk lining, whose appearance under the microscope—centuries later—would determine the date of their making.

You can see and read much more about this at The Creators Project.

Trees 1.

From rq, who says, It’s an old property with old, old trees on it. The first two photos are the same tree from different angles. A lot of the trees had similar sort of burn marks on them, I don’t know if it’s human activity or lightning strikes, it was rather odd. Nobody’s lived there for 20 years, since the original house burnt down back in the 1990s. But the trees are still there.

Click for full size!

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© rq, all rights reserved.

When “Telling It Like It Is” Is Not Acceptable.

DFL House Minority Leader Melissa Hortman (screen grab).

DFL House Minority Leader Melissa Hortman (screen grab).

When is ‘telling it like it is’ not acceptable? When the telling is done by a woman, aiming a pointed remark at white men. Uh oh.

According to The Uptake, the incident happened on Monday while the Minnesota House was debating a bill that would increase penalties for protesters who block roads, a tactic successfully used by Black Lives Matters.

DFL House Minority Leader Melissa Hortman noticed that many members had not been on the floor to hear Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (DFL) speech comparing modern day protesters to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. So Hortman used a procedure known as “call of the House” to force lawmakers to return to the chamber.

“I hate to break up the 100 percent white male card game in the retiring room, but I think this is an important debate,” she said, exposing the activity of absent lawmakers.

Republican state Rep. Bob Dettmer objected: “I’m a white male. I respect everybody. But I really believe that the comments made by the Minority Leader were really not appropriate.”

“I have no intention of apologizing,” Hortman replied, adding that she was “really tired of watching women of color in particular being ignored. So I’m not sorry.”

[…]

However, Rep. Greg Davids (R-Preston) did think the statement was racist. Heather Carlson of the Rochester Post Bulletin reports that Davids thinks Hortman should resign over the comment. “I was greatly offended by minority leader Hortman’s racist statement about white males,” said Davids according to Carlson.

Mr. Davids has now gone the mortally offended route, and thinks Ms. Hortman should resign for saying something white men don’t like. He’s also claiming it’s racist. Idiotic Privilege, thy name is Davids.

Full story here.

A Few Words from Alan Cumming…

#ArtAgainstHate PLEASE SHARE by reposting, or volunteer if you would like to partake in this project. Help build a community with us by raising awareness of the bullying this administration is enabling. Find empowerment in the words they call you. In these chaotic times it’s easy to lose grasp of hope for this troubled country. Yet if we open our hearts and our minds to the lush array of souls and energy that surround us every day we can find common ground. And if we advocate others to try their best to learn just one positive thing about that person who may seem so alien on the surface, perhaps we all will discover that beneath the masks that we hide behind are actually more similarities than differences. And one by one, may we shed these words of hate that are spawned by fear of the unknown. #Model: @alancummingsnaps #Photographers: @StevenTrumon & @GINGERB3ARDMAN #MAKEUP: @makeupartbynoel #Retouch Collab: @shinehorovits #ArtistsAgainstTyranny #SpreadTheWord #LoveTrumpsHate #AmericaTheBeautiful #UnitedNotDivided

A post shared by Alan Cumming (@alancummingsnaps) on

#ArtAgainstHate PLEASE SHARE by reposting, or volunteer if you would like to partake in this project. Help build a community with us by raising awareness of the bullying this administration is enabling. Find empowerment in the words they call you. In these chaotic times it’s easy to lose grasp of hope for this troubled country. Yet if we open our hearts and our minds to the lush array of souls and energy that surround us every day we can find common ground. And if we advocate others to try their best to learn just one positive thing about that person who may seem so alien on the surface, perhaps we all will discover that beneath the mask we hide behind are actually more similarities than differences. And one by one, may we shed these words of hate that are spawned by fear of the unknown.

Source.

Looking for Knives.

Morissa Maltz.

Morissa Maltz.

Visiting Hot Springs, Arkansas is like walking into the past. A city stuck in time, it’s known as much for its history and naturally heated springs buildings as its mix of 1800s architecture and Art Deco—structures that are slowly crumbling yet still magical. One of the city’s iconic buildings, the gigantic and once abandoned Majestic Hotel, was recently demolished. A week before its dismantling, however, artist and filmmaker Morissa Maltz shot a video inside the hotel. Equal parts documentary, performance art piece, and music video for Dyan’s “Looking for Knives,” it is the final document of a space that held huge amounts of history.

In “Looking for Knives,” Maltz’s camera drifts through the hotels innards. Though The Majestic suffered a fire in 2014, the video focuses instead on paint peeling off walls and floors turning into dirt. Inspired by female artists like Pipilotti Rist, Francesca Woodman, and Maya Deren, for whom the body expresses emotion inside a space, Maltz also performs in the video, moving through the hotel’s crumbling corridors and interacting with its surfaces.

A lovely, haunting video and song. You can read and see more at The Creators Project.